Home Theater PC update

For my previous HTPC blog entries, you can refer to this link

http://www.2old2play.com/Blog/Permalink/626/35037

So like a lot of BluRay playback devices including the PS3 up until the release of the Slim, my HTPC wasn't able to do true HD lossless audio formats. In the HTPC world, no HDMI video cards yet support 'protected audio pathway' which is required to get HD audio, they only support 'protected video pathway' which is required for 720p/1080p resolution playback. So what happens is devides that can't do Bitstreaming downsample the BluRay 192khz audio to DVD quality 44khz audio. SO essentially you're watching HD video with SD audio and that's always bothered me that i'm not getting the most out of my BluRay movies when I have the receiver and speakers to take advantage of these HD audio formats.

I needed cash though, these HD audio cards are hellishly expensive, mostly because until june there was only one single audio card by Asus that could do HD audio. In June another company released an audio card but it's $250 bucks and requires a mini PCI-E port where as the Asus Xonar Slim is $150 and uses regular PCI. So I took part in a neighborhood garage sale and ended up making the 150 i needed to add this latest upgrade into my HTPC.

Installation was kind of a nightmare. You take the HDMI from the video card and then stick the other end into the IN on the HDAV, then plug the out into the HDMI cable going to your receiver. Seems straight forward but after cabling it up, no video at all not on the Bios screen and not when windows started. Double checking the cables, they looked fine. So at one point i decided just for shits and giggles i'd reverse the cables and see what happened, i got a blue no signal screen on the TV, but when i put them back the right way, suddenly video !!!!!! No idea why it now works when it has always been hooked up right but whatever, it works even after a few reboots.

Next up was an update to my ATI Catalyst driver set and installing the HDAV drivers. That was pretty straight forward, i already had TotalMedia Theater v3 installed which has special support for this audio card. That's another problem with these HD audio cards, the BluRay playback software needs to support them, TMT3 supports it but PowerDVD does not, they decided to only support the Auzen X-Fi HomeTheater HD audio card which is the more expensive one that just hit the market. Why they can't all play nice together, i don't know. Anyway the configuration took me about an hour to figure out and get all the right settings together. The HDAV installed using SPDIF as the audio output and I couldn't really tell that was the problem by the kind of funky config screen. After searching the 'net for some setup instructions I managed to get the HDAV config program dialed in. Then i had to tinker with the Vista audio player settings to make sure that was all where it needed to be. Last step was updating TMT3 to the latest version, the version I had supported DTSHD-MA but not Dolby TrueHD which it now does support post-upgrade.

So now with everything seemingly setup right, i threw Punisher WarZone in the drive and hoped for the best. Punisher WZ supports DTSHD-MA with 7.1 channels which is the main reason i picked it up when it was on sale. It sounded awesome ! Video playback was a bit smoother too since the HDAV was taking the audio load. Definitly glad i splurged and put this card into my system. One problem i have right now that i haven't been able to resolve yet is that I have sound sithin windows and within TMT3 but i don't have any sound using PowerDVD9. On occasion TMT3 can't play a disc so i then use PowerDVD instead so that's an outstanding issue I need to figure out.

Looking back though, when i built my HTPC this was a cheaper way to go, i threw this together for about 250 bucks and at the time BluRay players were $499 so it was a real economical solution. Plus i can stream media to my HDTV now and my plan was to record HDTV as well and use it as a DVR except Vista doesn't have a built in QAM tuner so that part so far hasn't reallly worked, Windows 7 should fix that. But if you want to build an HTPC just for bluray playback, it's not the economical way to go. Just in the core components the video card will run you ~$60, audio card $150 and BluRay drive $80. That's before you buy the regular computer components like cpu, ram hard drive, motherboard, case etc. If you want to merge all your devices into one box though being BluRay, Media Streaming and DVR there may still be some justification to go this route.