[RobB]

Here is my scenario, I have a distributed system where all my components are in a rack. I use a control4 for gui/audio switching and a concord matrix 8X8 switch to share/distribute all components in the rack on any TV in the house. I have two Dedicated home theatre TV"s that have the digital out from the pc's sound card going to the AMP where digital sound is decoded without a problem. I have the Analog jack from the PC going to the rest of the analog TV's. When I first installed XBMC on XP it worked just fine and then all of a sudden it stopped working. I just upgraded to Windows 7 yesterday and installed the latest realtek driver hoping that would solve it and still no downmixing for analog sound.

Does windows prevent both an analog and digital signal going through the sound card at the same time?

In order for sound to work I always have to manually switch xbmc to analog or digital depending on the TV I am watching or what I am watching or listening too. After upgrading to the latest Beta release/Windows 7 I also have to make one more change to select audio driver with speakers.

My HTPC is the following

NVidia 790 SLI MB with 8-channel HD audio via Realtek ALC888S codec
Windows 7
XBMC B1


I have tried changing just about every combination in the realtek driver app with no success. It have tried all builds of XBMC without success. Any help would be greatly appreciated. If a debug log is required let me know and I will gladly upload one


Thanks

[CatalystG]

Does windows prevent both an analog and digital signal going through the sound card at the same time?

Digital audio usually takes exclusive control over the sound. IE. I can't listen to music on say winamp while I have a DTS movie playing on my computer. There is an option in the Windows 7 sound control panel that says something along the lines of "Give exclusive control to an application." Disabling this might help.

[RobB]

Thanks for the reply. Unfortunatley it did not solve the issue.

[joshuass]

Windows shouldn't prevent analog and digital playing at the same time. In fact, with Vista/7, windows allows you to have more than 1 audio device used at the same time too now.

By downmixing, you mean you want the analog tv's to be able to watch your dts/dd movies in stereo right?

I guess I am unsure at how it all worked before? Are you saying you didnt need to change any settings in XBMC and depending on which TV you were at, it would just work?

What you said you were doing now though, makes sense. You basically tell XBMC to stop using the digital output, and start using the analog one. That makes sense to me, and would be my way of using XBMC on an analog-only tv.

For the driver issue, perhaps try and set it to "directsound default"?

[phvrc2nt]

I have the same experience as you do on w7. Unfortunately, the most recent realtek drivers still haven't solved this current issue of needing to choose only one output, either digital or analog but not both. I've seached this one thoroughly and to my knowledge, realtek is already investigating a workaround for the issue.

[RobB]

That is correct. When a dts movie is playing the sound should be in stereo on analog TV's and DTS on those plugged into the DTS amp's. I have tested all different ways and it seems that when digital sound is selected there is no analog sound. There are several threads on other sites that state that Vista and Windows 7 have dropped support for multiple audio source output. I found one set of intructions below for a realtek workaround but it has not worked for me so far. It might work for someone else so I will post it here.

_______________ Start of Quote
FIRST:
Open Control Panel
Click "Sound"
Click the "Playback" Tab
Right-click "Speakers" and click "Set as Default Device" <if the option is not available, it is already default>

THEN:
Click the "Recording" Tab
Right-click "Stereo Mix" and Click "Enable" (if disabled)
Right-click "Stereo Mix" again and click "Set as Default Device"
Right-click "Stereo Mix" yet again and click "Properties"
Click the "Listen" tab
Check "Listen to this device"
Under "Playback through this device:" select "Realtek Digital Output (Realtek...)"
Click OK to close Stereo Mix Properties.
Click OK to close Sound Devices

So to be clear, the Default Playback Device must be "Speakers" (analog) and the Default Recording Device must be "Stereo Mix" 'listening' to: "Realtek Digital Output."

_________________ End of Quote

I have also tried older realtek drivers and it still does not work. One suggestion was to us a DTS decoder box for splitting the signal but the only one I have found that might work is the Creative DDTS-100 which has not been discontinued.

My only option now seems to be to keep the second HTPC configured for analog sound and just run that unit for the stereo only TV's.

Windows shouldn't prevent analog and digital playing at the same time. In fact, with Vista/7, windows allows you to have more than 1 audio device used at the same time too now.

By downmixing, you mean you want the analog tv's to be able to watch your dts/dd movies in stereo right?

I guess I am unsure at how it all worked before? Are you saying you didnt need to change any settings in XBMC and depending on which TV you were at, it would just work?

What you said you were doing now though, makes sense. You basically tell XBMC to stop using the digital output, and start using the analog one. That makes sense to me, and would be my way of using XBMC on an analog-only tv.

For the driver issue, perhaps try and set it to "directsound default"?

[SikeMo]

I have a somewhat similar setup and use two different cards. My house has two "zones" that are controlled through a Pioneer SC-05 receiver. Zone 2 only accepts stereo analog audio (receiver limitation) and Zone 1 has my 5.1 setup. I ended up purchasing an nvidia gt 220 based video card with HDMI audio for the 5.1 zone. I wanted the ability to send 192 kHz audio from blu-ray discs. For Zone 2, I kept my old Turtle Beach Montego DDL and am using that for analog audio. With a recent driver update, it seems that Windows has been automatically selecting whichever zone is demanding the audio (not really sure but seems to work out this way), although I cannot output both signals simultaneously. I am honestly not sure if it is possible in Windows. In my case, I would have to change my receiver setup to get both zones to output the same signal simultaneously. Now if only we could get WASAPI exclusive mode support for bit-perfect passthrough on the HDMI.

[CatalystG]

Now if only we could get WASAPI exclusive mode support for bit-perfect passthrough on the HDMI.

There is a WASAPI patch already that apparently works, I haven't tried it myself however.

http://trac.xbmc.org/ticket/7406

[majo2005]

I have the same experience as you do on w7. Unfortunately, the most recent realtek drivers still haven't solved this current issue of needing to choose only one output, either digital or analog but not both. I've seached this one thoroughly and to my knowledge, realtek is already investigating a workaround for the issue.

I also have this problem. But only on Win7 .With WindowsXP SP2 there was no problem. But a "Extra"Option in XBMC would fix this.
I mean when we can configure seperatly the Outputs for Analog and for Digital in XBMC Audio options.

Analog = Use Lineout
Digital = Use SPDIF

or for those who want only use Analaog

Analog = Use Lineout
Digital = Use Lineout Downmix


I also have this Soundproblem using a Terratec Aureon 7.1 Space.
So its WIndows 7 wich makes the problems...or XBMC ... i dont know *g

sorry for my bad english...

[Halibutt]

+1 here, unfortunately. It worked right out of the box in XP, but it doesn't in Windows 7. Anyone found a workaround for it?
Cheers

[crapazit]

Hi all,

news about a solution??
thanks