Onboard Full HD Audio and Video Motherboard

[rawders]

I want to build a HTPC/desktop kinda thing, i want to get a onkyo 606 which if i am right can do audio and video on HDMI, are there any mother boards that will have good enough graphics for blu ray and 7.1 sound aswell?

Also Not realy sure what CPU to look at any recomendations given i want to use it for HD playback, and general desktop stuff and possible dual screen?

Thanks

[BenTheBookie]

Plenty of boards can handle the BluRay and 7.1 LCPM (I think I'm getting this bit right!) but the only way to get Full-HD Audio as in your thread title is with a dedicated audio card such as the Asus HDAV...which can be a bit of a pain to get working, but sounds awesome!

[Stephen Neal]

Yep - if you are happy with True HD and DTS HD decoded to multichannel PCM at 48kHz 16 bit then the nVidia IGP solutions (8200/8300 for AMD, 9300/9400 for Intel) are worth looking at.

I've built an HTPC around an E7300 CPU and a 9400 IGP Gigabyte E7AUM-DS2H motherboard and get 7.1 PCM via HDMI on our Onkyo SR 606, with True HD/DTS HD decoded in PowerDVD to multichannel PCM.

The nVidia IGPs also properly support 1920x1080 at 23.976, 59.94 and 50Hz refresh rates - so are good with "24p" displays.

[rawders]

Originally Posted by Stephen Neal

Yep - if you are happy with True HD and DTS HD decoded to multichannel PCM at 48kHz 16 bit then the nVidia IGP solutions (8200/8300 for AMD, 9300/9400 for Intel) are worth looking at.

I've built an HTPC around an E7300 CPU and a 9400 IGP Gigabyte E7AUM-DS2H motherboard and get 7.1 PCM via HDMI on our Onkyo SR 606, with True HD/DTS HD decoded in PowerDVD to multichannel PCM.

The nVidia IGPs also properly support 1920x1080 at 23.976, 59.94 and 50Hz refresh rates - so are good with "24p" displays.

Sorry i am new to this, so you get the gigabyte board give you this 7.1 PCM and graphics over 1 HDMI? thats what i want to go to my 606

[JUICE690]

Originally Posted by Stephen Neal

Yep - if you are happy with True HD and DTS HD decoded to multichannel PCM at 48kHz 16 bit then the nVidia IGP solutions (8200/8300 for AMD, 9300/9400 for Intel) are worth looking at.

I've built an HTPC around an E7300 CPU and a 9400 IGP Gigabyte E7AUM-DS2H motherboard and get 7.1 PCM via HDMI on our Onkyo SR 606, with True HD/DTS HD decoded in PowerDVD to multichannel PCM.

The nVidia IGPs also properly support 1920x1080 at 23.976, 59.94 and 50Hz refresh rates - so are good with "24p" displays.

Any chance you could post your build components?

I'm thinking of building my HTPC around that mobo myself and using it all to run blueray rips etc via XBMC

Sorry to threadjack btw

[rawders]

haha Thats perfectly ok juice690, i would be interested to kmnow as i am trying to get my spec together at the moment, but struggling as i am new to pc building

[JUICE690]

Me too! & I'm also running mine through an Onkyo 606.

Been spec-ing this for the last 3 weeks!

Started with Acer Revo, (£150) realised it was to lower spec. Moved onto a Asrock 330 (£280) and although Its better specced and will handle pretty much anything you throw at it, it is still stuttering on certain high bit-rate content and the audio output and (as far as I can tell) won't do Full HD, True HD, 7.1 Surround, and at that price point you may as well spend a little extra and do it yourself (he says post electric shock + fried motherboard )

So far I've put this together:-

To run XBMC with Aeon Stark Skin via Linux

SilverStone LASCALA LC17B Black Aluminium Desktop ATX Media Center Case £70
Gigabyte GA-E7AUM-DS2H, NVIDIA GeForce 9400 £108
Intel Pentium Dual-Core, E5200 £55
2GB (2x1GB) Corsair TwinX XMS2, DDR2 PC2-6400 (800) £26
450W Be Quiet Dark Power PRO BN071 £70

Nearly there...hopefully.

[Stephen Neal]

Originally Posted by JUICE690

Started with Acer Revo, (£150) realised it was to lower spec. Moved onto a Asrock 330 (£280) and although Its better specced and will handle pretty much anything you throw at it, it is still stuttering on certain high bit-rate content and the audio output and (as far as I can tell) won't do Full HD, True HD, 7.1 Surround, and at that price point you may as well spend a little extra and do it yourself (he says post electric shock + fried motherboard )

The Revo and AsRock 330 have the same HDMI audio facilities as other 9300/9400 motherboards like the E7AUM-DS2H. They all support 7.1 PCM via HDMI.

That is to say they will stream multichannel PCM (decoded from True HD or DTS HD by the PC player software) at 48kHz / 16 bit - or they will bitstream SPDIF quality DD/DTS tracks for external decoding.

There is no current motherboard that can bitstream True HD or DTS HD via HDMI for off-board decoding. For that you need a separate HDMI sound card like the Xonar HDAV currently - and have to use TMT as the player.

[Stephen Neal]

Originally Posted by JUICE690

Any chance you could post your build components?

I'm thinking of building my HTPC around that mobo myself and using it all to run blueray rips etc via XBMC

Sorry to threadjack btw

My nVidia HTPC is as follows - from memory:

E7AUM-DS2H Gigabyte motherboard
E7300 with stock cooler
4GB of Corsair RAM (PC-6400 I think)
Spinpoint F1 1TB Samsung HD
LG GGC-H20L BD/HD-DVD Combo drive
Silverstonetek Grandia GD02 case (needed it to be shallow and silver and have a stealthed optical drive. Nicely hides USB and Firewire under flap as well. Not cheap though.)
Corsair 450VX PSU (I think)
Pinnacle 7010ix 2xDVB-S 2xDVB-T PCI-e tuner card
DLink Bluetooth USB dongle
Apple BT keyboard and BT Mighty mouse
MS USB IR MC Remote (old XP MCE version)

Win 7 32 bit RC 7100 (so not using the full 4GB of RAM)
PDVD 9 for BD replay
Win 7 Media Center for TV
MyMovies for DVD/BD replay (mainly ISOs streamed from unRAID server connected via GigE)

Onkyo SR606 amp (PC connected to DVD / HDMI 1 input **IMPORTANT**)

Sony 40W4000 Full HD / 24p True Cinema TV

Still don't have reliable black levels between BD and DVD (which I have acheived with another HTPC based on an ATI 4550) - but finally got 5.1 PCM HDMI audio (including True HD and DTS HD decoded in PDVD) from the PC to the amp. Took a while... DD/DTS are bitstreamed over HDMI for the amp to decode from 7MC.

[LeeJS]

Originally Posted by Stephen Neal

My nVidia HTPC is as follows - from memory:

E7AUM-DS2H Gigabyte motherboard
Onkyo SR606 amp (PC connected to DVD / HDMI 1 input **IMPORTANT**)

Still don't have reliable black levels between BD and DVD (which I have acheived with another HTPC based on an ATI 4550) - but finally got 5.1 PCM HDMI audio (including True HD and DTS HD decoded in PDVD) from the PC to the amp. Took a while... DD/DTS are bitstreamed over HDMI for the amp to decode from 7MC.

OK, I have the same setup as this (although I'm running XP instead of 7) and I'm buggered if I can get it working. I can get DTS/DD over HDMI but every time I press pause the audio disappears and doesn't come back until I press stop and restart. I've tried ffdshow and AC3filter codecs and both exhibit the same problem.

I don't suppose you could let me know which drivers you're using and how you've configured the sound/codecs? It's driving me mental!

Cheers.

Lee.

[velveteer]

Originally Posted by LeeJS

... every time I press pause the audio disappears and doesn't come back until I press stop and restart. I've tried ffdshow and AC3filter codecs and both exhibit the same problem.

I don't suppose you could let me know which drivers you're using and how you've configured the sound/codecs? It's driving me mental!

Cheers.

Lee.

I'm having similar problems with a gigabyte ga-m78g-s2h. If anyone advice has any advice for getting the audio to 'stay' it would be much appreciated.

[conan]

Originally Posted by JUICE690

Any chance you could post your build components?

I'm thinking of building my HTPC around that mobo myself and using it all to run blueray rips etc via XBMC

Sorry to threadjack btw

Hey Juice, here is my thread doing pretty much as per your plan, running XBMC Aeon http://www.avforums.com/forums/home-...-re-build.html The main difference is I'm on windows not Linux so I need a more powerful CPU.

[albriscoe]

Originally Posted by Stephen Neal

Onkyo SR606 amp (PC connected to DVD / HDMI 1 input **IMPORTANT**)

Sony 40W4000 Full HD / 24p True Cinema TV

Still don't have reliable black levels between BD and DVD (which I have acheived with another HTPC based on an ATI 4550) - but finally got 5.1 PCM HDMI audio (including True HD and DTS HD decoded in PDVD) from the PC to the amp. Took a while... DD/DTS are bitstreamed over HDMI for the amp to decode from 7MC.

Hi Stephen

can I ask why is it important to have the HTPC connected to DVD/HDMI 1 input.

I ask this because mine is connected to game/tv HDMI1 on my 905 so I wandered why mate thats all.

Also I have issues, I have an ASUS M3N-H HDMI board which we are trying to get audio/video via HDMI from the m/board and using VMC/MEDIA BROWSER/TMT3 (PATCHED). Video appears to be ok but no audio when playing bluray iso`s with Dolby True HD audio.

Also after trying all the drivers in the world to get the audio, we found that within windows sound options testpage no audio at all from stereo or 7.1 but we had infact audio when playing a movie

Anyhelp here would be appreciated

the m/board infact appears to be one of the ones where you can actually have 7.1 HD audio/video via HDMI

cheers Al

[Stephen Neal]

For some reason Onkyo 606s (not sure about others) behave differently with HDMI 1/DVD than they do with their others. Not sure if they do different EDID signalling or what - but many people have found that the HDMI audio from PCs only works reliably when the PC is connected to HDMI1.

In my case if I connected the HDMI output to another input my HDMI audio device was disabled as it didn't see an HDMI audio compatible destination.

HOWEVER - this may have been also an incompatiblity issues with the nVidia HDMI Audio drivers - so newer drivers may have fixed it. I've not tried again recently - I just leave my HTPC connected to HDMI1.

I'm currently running Win7 RC 7100 and haven't got DD or DTS bitstreaming out from MC at the moment. DD is being decoded - not sure what is happening with DTS as I don't have that many DTS DVDs. The BD audio is handled by PDVD9 and DD/DTS/Colby True HD and DTS HD MA/HR are all decoded by PDVD to 48k/16bit 5.1 PCM.

[sergeis]

I have GIGABYTE GA-E7AUM-DS2H 9400 motherboard with 7.1 sound over on-board HDMI graphics and Onkyo SR606.
I had hard time making it pass stream over that, but it is really all up to software.
I installed Gigabyte Vista 32 drivers from the original disk bundled with MB, selected Control Panel->Sound and set NVIDIA/HDMI as default, configed that to 7.1 (I have Infinity 1200 speaker system).
Then sample WAV/WMA files with 7.1 sound played OK. To get all the files play I installed K-Lite 5.0 full, when installing check config and make sure that ffdshow filters are used for DTS, AC3 etc - uncheck AC3Filter whenever you see it. The AC3Filter cannot handle 7.1 output via HDMI, it always sends 5.1 as PCM.
Once installed, go to ffdshow audio codec config (in programs>K-Lite>Config), specifically to Mixer section - cancel that, then Output - select AC3 and DTS as pass-through S-PDIF/HDMI, then 16 bit for everything else. I also chose AC3 encoding in that section - i.e. any non-AC3 or DTS PCM is encoded into AC3 and sent over to receiver in that format - this gives more flexibility to handling singal by Onkyo 606, it appears that with multichannel PCM number of possible sound modes is not complete.

Anyway - I get DD and DTS lights on Onkyo 606 on depending on signal, i.e. most mkv's and avi's pass their DTS/AC3 to onkyo as bitstream that is decoded by onkyo itself...

If anyone has experience how to handle with the latest BD formats with 7.1 in TS-kind of streams - please share...

It is yet to see how True-HD etc. with 7.1 channels will be handled, I don;t have anything with it yet.