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Woo-hoo, I can do DVD-A on my HTPC!

PaulyT

PaulyT

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I'm so stoked! I just got my first DVD-A - based on a recent thread, I ordered King Crimson's Lark Tongues in Aspic in CD+DVD-A, thinking I'd probably just be able to do the CD and the (lossy) DTS5.1 from the DVD, but as it wasn't too much more than the CD alone and it has some concert video clips, I figured what the heck. But I did a little digging, found a plugin for foobar2000 that decodes DVD-A:

:text-link:

... and after configuring surround output on my PC, I can now play this in full lossless on my main system through HDMI from the PC! I'm very excited, I really wasn't expecting this to be possible, I wasn't sure the audio system on the PC would be capable of handling multi-channel lossless over HDMI. But this works, and my 885 says it's getting 5.1 PCM @ 192k, guess the player is up-converting as the booklet and the audio track properties in foobar both say it's "only" 24/96. And as this is the only DVD-A I own, I won't be using it much, but it's cool to know that I can. Now on to some listening!

:music-listening:
 
This is a very cool album, definitely diggin' it. Wow, solo violin in a rock track, that's awesome.
 
See, this seems to me to be a pretty important step in HTPC. Last time I investigated this - and admittedly it was years ago with my old computer - the most I could get out of my HTPC was the formats that were available via SPDIF (which was re-routed to HDMI), which were DD/DTS 5.1, but not full lossless M-PCM. But now, without my having to do anything or buy a $300 sound card, windows (7 64-bit) is saying that my HDMI output (on my nVidia graphics card, not the native MB's HDMI) supports all the lossless formats, up to DTS-MA and Dolby TrueHD. And, obviously, M-PCM up to 192k. So I assume, if I had a BD player on my PC, I could get all these lossless formats from that, too. Personally, I don't care, because my BDP does all that already, and SACD as well; but the only thing I couldn't do before was DVD-A. Now I can, and my system as a whole is finally universal.

This is awesome. Yeah it's geeky and not really useful all the time, not to mention requiring a $1500 new PC, but still just the ability to do all this is new and exciting.
 
Wow, Congrats! I just posted on the thread where you'd gotten Lark's, glad you got the Steve Wilson remix and can listen to it! :handgestures-thumbup:
 
Yeah, I just wonder why Steve Wilson continues to produce DVD-A when it seems to be such a dwindling format... SACD, BD-audio, there are other more forward-looking (IMHO) formats. Oh well, I may now start collecting these King Crimson releases; I've already ordered In the Court in 5.1.
 
PaulyT said:
Yeah, I just wonder why Steve Wilson continues to produce DVD-A when it seems to be such a dwindling format...
Click to expand...

Me too, although with my new Oppo, which doesn't clip off the front of DVD-A songs, I don't care! :dance:
 
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