[stefvienna]

Hi guys,

I got stuck on getting my new Windows HTPC to work ...
8 GB ram,
CPU: AMD - A10-5700, video driver is AMD Catalys v13.9.
Motherboard: Asrock - FM2A85X Extreme4-M
Soundcard: Asus Xonar HDAV1.3 Slim connected to a Yamaha A1030 home cinema receiver with 7.1 speaker set via HDMI
Screen: Philips Scineo 47" Ambilight connected to teh Yamaha AVR via HDMI
All lastest drivers applied.
The system generallc works and displays all movies fine when using e.g. Media Player Classic x64, even with DTS-HD soundtracks.
I tried to install XBMC 12.2 and 13.0 alpha 8 - with 12.2 no luck at all, with 13.0 I get a black screen when starting any movie.
When I press escape I get the XBMC nav bar as a pop-up and I can see the movie running in the background, still there is no sound at all. When I click the fullscreen button, the screen blanks again.
I have set the audio out to WASAPI, when I enable the SPDIF interface I can only select SPDIF as direct out, when I disable it, as everything should go out via HDMI, I get an error message the no direct out interface is available.
How can I directb out through HDMI (I wnat to use bitstreaming not PCM) and unblank the screen?
I'm not a newbie to XBMC, I have two Rasperry Pis, one Pivos Xios DS running Linux , one Odroid-X running Linux and one Nettop running Linux, but the Windows box drives me cracy .... the only reason why I have built this windows HTPC was to get 7.1 HD bitstream sound working ... :-(

Cheers, Stefan

[stefvienna]

Update ....
I've put an HDCP-stripper between the Asus Xonar and the Yamaha AVR, just for a test, now I have a perfect picture - but still no sound during movie playback. I do have the GUI navigation sounds and sound when I play music ... wierd ...
Any ideas ?

Cheers, Stefan

---

One more thing - I noticed that during movie playback XBMC obviously uses some 10% underscan, i.e. the picture is smaller then while in GUI or desktop. This cannot be changed via screen calibration during movie playback.
How can this be changed?

[stefvienna]

Update again:
I activated the SPDIF-Direct Sound interface and now I can hear sound - sort of - during movie playback through HDMI although nothing is connected via SPDIF ... weird .... still the sound is unusable, it's sort of popping in and out, like with a loose contact, futhermore my AVR still says PMC instead of AC3, DTS, DTS-HD, etc., so it's still not bitstreaming. I guess the driver for the Asus Xonar HDAV 1.3 Slim is the culprit.
Any idea how to get it to work ?

[stefvienna]

Hi all,

really weird, I finally got it working.
What I did was a complete reinstall of Windows and this time I did NOT install Total Media Theatre 6 on this box, now I got nearly everything working fine.
Just for the sake of the argument I did several re-installs and really TMT6 completely fucks up the Windows installation.
I finally also upgraded the OS to Win8.1, it still works fine.
So what I have now is a completely silent HTPC built on a fanless Streacom case, an ASRock mobo with a AMD A10-5700 APU and an Asus Xonar HDAV 1.3 slim sound card connected to a Yamava Avantage A-1030 AVR.
Also DTS-HD streaming works fine :-)
Just three rather cosmetic things are left to be solved:
1.) on most movies, XBMC seems to use 10% underscan, i.e. I get a black frame around the picture which cannot be removed via picture calibration.- any idea on how to correct that? This underscan does not happen with Media Player Clssic x64.
2.) I have some 6-channel, 24bit 384kHz WAV-files, which play fine via Media Player Classic x64, but stutter on XBMC. Sounds like XBMC is trying to apply some processing to it instead of just pumping it out via HDMI. But this is not really an issue.
6-cahnnel flacs with 192kHz play just fine.
3.) I have a couple of raw dts-files, they only work after them wrapping up in a container, eg. m2ts, mks, etc. - is there any chance I can play them raw?

Cheers, Stefan

[noggin]

The overscan may be caused by the overscan settings varying between frame rates within the AMD gfx drivers. I haven't used ATI/AMD cards for a while, but ISTR that I had to adjust overscan in Windows separately for each frame rate (as it saw them as totally different modes), from within Catalyst. ISTR they didn't make it obvious where this adjustment was in the later releases.

I think I had to do it for 50Hz, 59Hz, 60Hz, 23Hz and 24Hz modes to cover all eventualities.

[stefvienna]

Hi noggin,

many thanks for the heads up, that makes perfectly sense!
I did a bit of googling for AMD underscan and there seem to be some registry hack around to fix it permanently.
I'll try it out next weekend, as I'm travelling right now and keep you posted.

Cheers, Stefan