Windows 8, HDMI Audio - Save me from my stupid solution.

[Aquitaine]

Hi,

 

First time dealing with a real HiFi HTPC solution and banging my head against the wall on something that seems like it ought to be simple.

 

Setup: Windows 8 HTPC with HDMI audio out from an NVIDIA GTX 760 GPU to a Yamaha RX-V675 receiver and a 5.1 speaker setup.

 

Windows 8 detects the hardware and shows 8-channels out and all the correct encoding support.

 

The problem is with Windows: if I configure the speakers as 5.1, the Windows audio stack says 'hey I got 5.1 channels alla time' even when playing stereo sources and so the receiver goes 'ok no up-mixing for you.'

 

Works great for actual 5.1 audio but half of my listening is iTunes.

 

It seems to me that there ought to be some way for Windows to just bistream everything over the HDMI out and let the receiver deal with it. I tried monkeying around with ffdshow and ReClock but neither seemed to have any effect on iTunes. I went into iTunes and told it to use WASAPI but still no difference - the shared WASAPI mode is still looking at the Windows speaker config and going 'derrr 5.1!'

 

My stupid solution is that my RX-V675 supports Airplay and I can tell iTunes to connect to it over the network, where it is smart enough to send just the 2 channels and then the AVR upmixes accordingly. But I can't believe that ethernet is the answer when we have a perfectly good HDMI connection going.

 

I've spent the last two days googling the heck out of this but the only surefire solution I've found is switching to another media player like XMBC that uses WASAPI Exclusive mode. I don't want to do that. Is there no way for WASAPI shared to figure this out?

 

Thank you!

Aq

[Skeptic]

WASAPI Shared has no control over the device and uses the current Windows settings.

WASAPI Exclusive is able to control the device and change the output mode from 2.0/5.1/7.1 etc

 

iTunes is an extremely limited player, and does not have options for this.

I'm sure most of the audiophile players are capable of doing this, but I know that JRiver can - and it has library management features that exceed iTunes' capabilities. Many of the audiophile players have very limited library tools, which is why some people stick to iTunes.

 

JRiver is not only a high end audio player, it also offers the best video quality that you can get from your HTPC, and can use your GTX 760 for high quality image processing.

[Aquitaine]

Thank you for the details. Just two follow-up questions.

 

Is there no way for 'current windows settings' to handle bitstreaming correctly? Not just for iTunes, but for anything - either to encode the output or just pass the raw audio, or is the answer there no because that's exactly what exclusive mode is for?

 

Secondly, I can consider switching to JRiver but will it handle an iTunes protected audio and video, or does it require that I divorce myself from Apple entirely?

 

Yes is an acceptable answer - but as with any tough break-up I'm eager to know what comes next, as in, will I be purchasing music and video from Amazon? Somewhere else? What do you recommend?

[Skeptic]

Is there no way for 'current windows settings' to handle bitstreaming correctly? Not just for iTunes, but for anything - either to encode the output or just pass the raw audio, or is the answer there no because that's exactly what exclusive mode is for?

I don't believe so - but I decode everything to PCM in my setup. Bitstreaming causes AV sync issues due to the separate audio and video clocks used in a PC.

 

The short version is that you have three options for video playback on a PC:

1. Leave the video and audio clocks alone. This will result in audio drifting in and out of sync over time.
   
2. Drop video/audio frames to maintain audio sync. This results in stuttering video or distorted audio.
   
3. Monitor the video clock, and continually resample the audio to be in sync. This means video is smooth and audio is in sync. The resampling should be imperceptible.
   

If you are bitstreaming, you only have #1 or #2 as an option. If you decode to PCM (which can be done losslessly in JRiver) #3 becomes an option, and this is implemented as the VideoClock option in JRiver.

 

Secondly, I can consider switching to JRiver but will it handle an iTunes protected audio and video, or does it require that I divorce myself from Apple entirely?

It will play iTunes protected audio, but I'm not sure about video. You may find that if you delete and re-download your music from iTunes, that you will now have DRM-free versions for most of it. Some albums are still protected though. Unfortunately I don't think there's any way to know which albums those will be.

 

Yes is an acceptable answer - but as with any tough break-up I'm eager to know what comes next, as in, will I be purchasing music and video from Amazon? Somewhere else? What do you recommend?

I still buy CDs or lossless quality tracks online where available. The quality of compressed audio from services like iTunes and Amazon is just too low for me. I prefer to give up a little convenience for the sake of quality.

[designmule]

I can't answer all the questions but I have a little insight into the iTunes protected files. I'm new to jRiver but I was unable to play iTunes protected files. I read somewhere that I could delete the protected file from the library and iTunes might download an unprotected file.

 

On the several files I tried this proved to not be the case. In the end, I signed up to iTunes Match (which is $25 per year) I then using iTunes I deleted the protected files, a little icon showed up asking if I wanted to download from the could. These new files are unprotected files and I was successfully able to import them into jRiver.

 

I'll reiterate that I am very new to jriver so it might be possible to get the protected files to play. I think that prior to iTunes Match you were able to redownload your protected files as unprotected but that is no longer the case (from what I can tell).

[designmule]

Oh, and I will cancel the iTunes Match subscription shortly. In my case, it was only needed for the conversion.

[Skeptic]

JRiver should prompt you to download Quicktime, which it uses to play protected content.

 

If you're running the latest iTunes, you should have the option to download from the cloud without having to subscribe to iTunes match.

Perhaps the iTunes match will let you download a DRM free copy of files which are still DRM protected when you re-download them though.