HTPC and Surround Sound

As I mentioned in my previous post, I am happily using Netflix for my scant television needs. My current setup is using a Roku (first generation w/ HDMI) on the extra television, and a Home Theater PC (HTPC) that I built for the main television. The Roku is ok, it’s a little laggy and annoying at times, but it’s acceptable for the occasional use it gets. The HTPC has worked pretty well and I’ve been pleased with it.

Eventually I decided that my TV speakers were horrible and it was finally time to give in and purchase an A/V receiver and some speakers. I found a pioneer VSX-1022 (FYI for anyone interested in buying this, the “upconversion” for video does not work for the Xbox, the whole reason I bought the unit) and bought a 5.1 set of Pioneer speakers.  Everything hooked up easy enough, but I could not get surround sound working on my HTPC over HDMI. To make matters worse, I couldn’t even use any of the Dolby/DTS options to upmix the audio, the receiver would only allow stereo and PCM. After tinkering around with this, I have finally found a solution which I am sharing here for anyone else that might have this problem.

Once you configure your playback device to use more than stereo, windows appear to output all sound as multi-channel PCM. If it is a stereo source, as far as I can tell, windows still sends the channels; they are just null and void. This was stopping my receiver from upmixing the audio, since as far as it could tell the audio source was surround sound.

The problem is that windows is processing the audio, which is not want I want. I would prefer for the receiver that I bought to handle audio processing. As far as I can tell, my only option is to try and force each application to output using bit-streaming. This means enabling exclusive mode (make sure that box is checked!) and enabling WASAPI for the application. This causes a perfect bit for bit copy of the data to be sent straight to the receiver for processing.

Sadly, it seems that not all applications can use this. I have downloaded a WASAPI plugin for Winamp, and it has been working well. I hear that I have some options for Media Player Classic, although I haven’t started down this path yet. I can not get Netflix to use WASAPI mode and not PCM. If anyone has any ideas on how to go about this I would love to hear them. Currently, if I want to upmix Netflix using Dolby ProLogic II Movies, I have to configure my playback device back to stereo mode. I would love to know the reason why windows has to output everything as multi-channel PCM. It is one heck of a stupid oversight on the developer’s part, unless of course there is a valid technical reason for it that I am not aware.

Hopefully this will save someone else a few hours of trouble.

Television

I’ve always hated the idea of paying to watch television. Why would I want to pay a fair amount of money every month for mediocre programming that rarely interests me; what about the dozen channels that I must subscribe too that are rarely watched, most likely to subsidize the cost of the one good channel. On top of that, I am expected to pay for the right to watch the many commercials that are broadcast? The whole idea just doesn’t sound like a very good bargain, especially now that there are alternatives, perhaps not the most viable, but what can we do until the content producers agree to play ball?

Needless to say I do not pay for cable television. I subscribed to Netflix and Hulu, ended up dropping Hulu after several months and have been happy with Netflix and purchasing cheap Blu-ray discs. Comparing Netflix and Hulu, I felt like Netflix was a much better value. Hulu has all of these annoying clips and previews which would get mixed in with the videos. At the time, it felt as if both options had a lot of the same content. When it came down to comparing the two, Netflix did not require that I watch commercials, making the choice easy.

Not to say that Netflix does not have its share of flaws. Everything can improve; the following annoyances come to mind:

• When streaming content on a computer, surround sound is not available
• There are no options for per device settings, in particular quality control per device.
• Netflix has lots of B movies, heck, some of these movies are about as amateur as  you  can get.
• Netflix really needs some better/more ways to sort and search through their titles.

I’m sure not all of this is Netflix’s fault. I've heard from a fair amount of people that Netflix really has to fight with the content producers to get the shows it currently has. Sadly, it seems that these content producers are slow to adapt their business models to modern times. Without much competition, we can expect it to be a slow process.