DD/DTS passthrough in MCE2005

[cherryferret]

Hi All, I need a soundcard with optical out to do the above. I know there is a common problem with doing this in Media Center. I do have a M-Audio 24/96 at the moment which works fine with PowerDVD but is a non starter with MCE. Can anyone recommend a card which will work. I was thinking of the Terratec Aureon 5.1 PCI but again I know people have had the same problem with this one.

[jameson_uk]

Hi All, I need a soundcard with optical out to do the above. I know there is a common problem with doing this in Media Center. I do have a M-Audio 24/96 at the moment which works fine with PowerDVD but is a non starter with MCE. Can anyone recommend a card which will work. I was thinking of the Terratec Aureon 5.1 PCI but again I know people have had the same problem with this one.
IIRC the problem is actually MCE not the hardware ??

Do you not have optical out on your mobo ? (I run my HTPC on standard XP and use Meedio as the front-end, DD/DTS passthrough works great using the onboard optical out)

[cherryferret]

Hi, I have spdif out via a header on my Mobo. But I havn't been able to get it to work. I gave up and tried the 24/96 as I had it spare. The frustration is that I'm sure I have had the soundcard pass through on another MCE set up I had a good while ago. All I want to do now is get the sound working properly. So rather than persist with what I've got I just want to get another card which is known to work. But this seems impossible. It really is crazy that Microsoft design a system that is, in part, intended to play DVD's but will not allow surround sound to be passed to an A/V receiver.

[eXistenZ]

I have an M-Audio Revolution 5.1 and run MCE 2005 and get DD pass through absolutely fine... It runs over an SPDIF cable not optical, but that's easy enough to convert. All I did was set the MAudio control panel software scheme to Digital, ran through the MCE speaker setup and hey presto. You do have to disable the menu sounds in MCE though, because if one of them plays while a DVD is playing the sound cuts out.
Alternatively try an Audigy, I've had one of them working fine too.

[cherryferret]

I can't make any sense out of this. I downloaded the latest drivers, and on installing them all I could get is sound from the front left speaker,even in stereo when using MCE. Don't ask my why, but I closed MCE, opened WMP10, briefly played a CD track (which played fine), then on trying MCE again everything played perfectly, even DD passthrough. I havn't restarted the machine yet. I suspect that things will be back to as before when I do. This is what is the most frustrating, no apparent logic to why things often don't work and occasionally do.