Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.asus (More info?)

Hi,

I've just bought a brand new HP pavalion which came bundled with the
Asus TV FM card, and a Realtek HD onboard audio card. I've got the
digital audio output hooked up to my surround receiver, and working
fine in 5.1 dolby, e.g when watching DVD's but any audio from the Asus
card is only output via the analog output on the PC...nothing goes
through the digital output.

I'm slightly confused....is this an issue with the sound card, the
capture card, or the software (InterVideo home theater) ? How is the
audio on the audio card connected through to the sound card ? Do I
need a new capture card that has a digital output, and route that to
the sound card's digital input ? Am I trying to do the impossible ?

Any help is much appreciated.

Andy

Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.asus (More info?)

Hi Paul,

Thanks for your very informative reply, and apologies for my late
repsonse.

Since posting I've found a few things. Opened up the box to see how
the TV card was connected, and it is via an cable into the CD in on
the mother board.

According to Realtek (BTW, it's an 880D), they said this maybe
configured by choosing an option "Output digital and analog" from
their control panel applet. No such option exists. They then replied
by saying:

> This function only support PCM Mode ( not Dolby digital ) .
> We support this feature by motherboard model .
> Maybe your motherboard didn't be supported by our driver .

Which is interesting, but confusing since both PCM and Dolby Digital
output are supported, just not the analog in...digital out.

I've also raised the question to HP, who where useless, but this is in
Hong Kong and their tech support here are handled by a 3rd party
contractor...

I've since stumbled on a software solution to this problem. You may
have heard of Snapstream Beyond TV, this has allows you to "pause live
TV". With this software, which I supposed must constantly record and
playing back in realtime, I get the audio output via the digital
output perfectly

The downside is I find their software occasionally hangs my PC....but
that's another issue altogether !

I'm still toying with the idea of buying another capture card. For
instance one based on this chipset appears to support bus mastering of
audio as well as video.

http://www.semiconductors.philips. [...] 010468.pdf

They state "It features a single slot PCI
card for analog video and TV stereo sound decoding and capture
through the PCI bus to the graphic frame buffer or directly to system
memory (e.g. for time-shift recording). A stereo audio signal can be
captured
from the line in (stereo) connector or decoded from the tuner's
sound IF signal. Once captured, the audio signal can be looped via an
analog audio loop-back cable, to the sound card, or bus mastered on
the host PCI bus."

This may provide another solution to my problem, and I could use any
TV capture software I like - maybe something that doesn't crash, and
that could flip channels quicker than Snapstream, would be nice

Cheers,
Andy