I'm considering building a media server based on a J1900 board (Asrock Q1900-ITX) that will be connected to my TV across my living room using an HDMI cable. Using Win7 as the OS I am planning to run it as a low power, quiet dual NAS/HTPC that has shared network drives and uses XBMC for playback to my TV as well as UPNP media sharing across the network.
I have a 5.1 audio system with receiver capable of decoding DD/DTS/DDTrueHD/DTS-HD. The lack of HD audio passthrough on J1900 boards when using Windows is a bit of a fly in the ointment, because I originally wanted an HTPC to replace my smart TV's own playback (cannot feed HD audio back through the ARC).
I am looking to see what workarounds there may be, e.g.:
- Is it possible to setup XBMC to decode DD TrueHD to 5.1 channel PCM and feed this on to my receiver? If so, would it place a large burden on the J1900 CPU to perform the software decode of the DD TrueHD track? If it doesn't affect the video playback then it's acceptable.
- In the case of DTS-HD, will XBMC recognise the lack of HD audio compatibility and fallback from DTS-HD to the core DTS soundtrack? In that case I don't mind - getting surround sound at all is more important to me than getting lossless surround sound
Alternatively it could, again, just decode the DTS-HD to 5.1 PCM and output that to the receiver.
I think one way to implement the workarounds above would be to disable passthrough in the XBMC System settings but set "Number of channels" to 5.1 - this would make sure XBMC knows there is a 5.1 capable receiver at the other end. Unfortunately it also means standard DTS and DD tracks will get decoded by XBMC with a corresponding needless increase in CPU load, unless you can be bothered to change the settings in between shows.
I've tried to do some testing with my current PC but as it has full HDCP support and can passthrough HD audio, I can't test XBMC's behaviour. It does appear that disabling passthrough to force output of 5.1 PCM is working (though my budget receiver is unhelpfully not telling me what kind of signal it is receiving so I can't be certain). Any help appreciated! If I can confirm this as a viable workaround then I can buy now and cross my fingers for Intel to update their bloody drivers...
If anyone's wondering, I don't want to go with a non-Windows solution because I am looking for the ability to share drives across the network, good peripheral compatibility, Steam in-home streaming and the ability to implement software RAID in the future when I have more HDDs. OpenElec would not be suitable in that regard. Of course an unRAID NAS with a separate OpenElec HTPC would solve the issue but that loses all the cost savings from having a single box. Anyway, by going this route I still have the escape plan of buying a separate HTPC later if any unacceptable flaws or limitations crop up with this build!
