[Jackie78]

Hi,

I have a realtek ALC 889 onboard Audio Chipset that supports DTS connect, which means it can encode DTS from Multichanel Audio, and I'd like to use the feature of XBMC that says to upmix stereo signals to all speakers.

however, no matter what I try, stereo music (MP3 files) are never mixed up to all speakers. My DTS capable Receiver is connected via optical SPDIF to my audio hardware.

What do I have to do to make that work?

[althekiller]

I'm pretty sure we don't currently support such HW. Support would have to be added to ffmpeg or some other open source library before we would consider it. Given the licensing that surrounds DTS, I don't see this happening any time soon.

[tslayer]

I believe that option is just for XBMC on Xbox (Output stereo to all speakers). I could be mistaken though.

Sorry.

[SlaveUnit]

Correct tslayer. This only works on the xbox.

[Jackie78]

I'm pretty sure we don't currently support such HW. Support would have to be added to ffmpeg or some other open source library before we would consider it. Given the licensing that surrounds DTS, I don't see this happening any time soon.

Yeah, cocerning the licensing stuff I guess so too, so let me explain: this chipset takes simple multichannel output that any application in Windows can generate, and puts it into a DTS stream automatically. So as XBMC developers, all you have to do is support ordinary multichannel output, and the DTS encoding will be done by this chip and its drivers automatically, so that it can be transported via SPDIF to a receiver capable of decoding DTS. This is a fancy feature, and I have tested it with several applications, it works fine. Unfortunately, it looks like XBMC under Windows doesn't support multichannel at all, as tslayer already pointed out.

Will this be implemented someday? Would be really nice to have

[natethomas]

DTS Connect and Dolby Digital Live are actually services that occur after the audio is output. The way a computer is setup with them, you simply set XBMC to analog audio, turn off the downmix, and then the soundcard captures the audio, converts it to ac3 or dts in realtime, and delivers the signal over toslink.

Thus, XBMC coders should not need to worry about DTS Connect compatibility. If someone figured out how to send mp3 music to all speakers in analog mode, the DTS Connect folk would already be covered.

Edit: Beat me to it, Jackie.

[althekiller]

In that case, surely the driver can upmix stereo on its own? Otherwise, I believe phi is planning upmixing via a SW AC3 encoder at some point in his audio system rewrite. AFAIK he's no where near that stage at this point, but I'll point him at this thread to comment.

EDIT: Silly bastard found it on his own

[phi2039]

MasterAudio's matrix mixer will do the up-mixing to multichannel PCM. As long as the device reports that it can handle 5.1 channels, xbmc will provide them, to be handled as the device sees fit.

[Jackie78]

Thanks for your replies, I am really looking forward to see this feature someday in XBMC. I was (and still am) a fan of it on the XBox, and having it on my HTPC as an additional mediacenter is great, especially for music, since no other mediacenter software I know handles fast rewinding and fast forward in music files so good (most other players can only "jump" but not really fasten the speed of the music to 4x, 8x, etc. like XBMC does)