SPDIF support

[Jarod Wilson]

On Friday 06 April 2007 12:46:43 Thomas Charron wrote:
> On 4/6/07, Jarod Wilson <jarod at wilsonet.com> wrote:
> > On Friday 06 April 2007 12:05:39 brk wrote:
> > > For general 2-channel listening it's not worth it, IMO.
> >
> > There's at least one more reason for it. If you're doing spdif, you're
> > probably handing off the raw digital audio stream to a device that has a
> > much better dolby digital decoder (your amp) than a sound card, so you'll
> > get truer sound. Its an absolute must for me for HDTV and DVD viewing.
>
>   That OTA HDTV?

In my case, no, not at the moment, but that doesn't matter one lick. In the 
case of the major networks, its the exact same mpeg2 program stream that 
winds up being viewed for both cable and over the air HDTV.

> Many HDTV content providers gimp the quality of the 
> audio down to 5.1 over the SPDIF

Erm, "gimp it down to 5.1"? That *is* dolby digital, and its the form of dolby 
digital I've seen in all HDTV recordings I've ever captured...

> and will only provide 1080p/Dolby 
> 7.1 over HDMI.  Just a note.

I've never seen an HDTV show broadcast in 1080p, or with DD7.1 sound. Where 
are you getting this data from? And I fail to see how 7.1 audio would only be 
allowed on HDMI. There's no copy protection bits here. These are just mpeg2 
files. You can prod the files directly with ffmpeg, mencoder, mplayer, etc. 
directly to see what audio streams are present.

-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod at wilsonet.com