Auzentech HomeTheater HD Preview: Bitstreaming True HD/DTS-HD MA
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 2, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Let’s...Get...Busy
Pardon the early 90s reference, it’s the first thing that came to me and I didn’t want to use the word “unboxing” on this page; but that’s effectively what it is.
While the ASUS Xonar HDAV comes in a box you’d expect from a motherboard company, the Auzentech X-Fi HomeTheater HD is a bit more polished. You’d expect it would be for a sound card that costs $250.
Inside the slipcover you have two separate boxes; one holds the card and the other has all of the cables and driver disc.
The setup works like this. You run a cable from your video card (or video output on your motherboard) to the Auzentech card. It combines the digital signal with the audio output from the sound card and sends it down a single HDMI cable from the card itself. Auzen provides a DVI-to-HDMI as well as a regular HDMI cable to aid you in this process.
You also get an analog break out cable for ins and outs.
The X-Fi HomeTheater HD is a full height PCIe x1 card:
Despite its length there's no retention notch for well designed motherboards that include a compatible clip. There's a lot on the card, including an interesting set of jumpers:
The first jumper block lets you configure how the video signal gets sent to the X-Fi HTHD: either video HDMI input on the back of the card or over the PCIe bus. Apparently NVIDIA and Auzentech have been working on a way to pass video (or audio) over the PCIe bus instead of an external cable. This feature doesn't appear to work on any NVIDIA chipsets today, but it may at some point in the future (or with a future NVIDIA chipset).
The heart of the X-Fi HTHD is Creative Labs' X-Fi audio processor. It's most definitely overkill for what we're using the card for, but you've gotta justify that pricetag somehow.
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Fallen Kell - Thursday, September 3, 2009 - link
I would say no, it won't. Higher resolution means needing a higher bandwidth connection, either with more data in parallel, or at a faster speed. If they are stating limits, it means those are the limits. Currently, those are fine limits for dealing with current HDMI 1.3 spec equipment, since those do not require to handle anything higher than that. Remember, this is HDMI, not DVI. DVI supports much higher resolutions (well dual link DVI) in its specifications. HDMI does not.medi01 - Thursday, September 3, 2009 - link
Sorry for trolling, but I can't help posting it:"Let's make an anti pirate very-very-very-well-protected HD standard, so that nobody could steal our mega-cool-HD-content!"
"And let's make it so, that just watching it in the provided quality feels like an achievement!"
So, what's the status of "Blue Ray ripping" at the moment?
archer75 - Friday, September 4, 2009 - link
Blu Ray ripping is quite easy to do. There is a great guide over at avsforum.comJust rip the video to mkv, the DTS-HD MA or true HD to lossless FLAC, subtitles if you need them, all with EAC3to. Then merge the files together with mkvmerge. Done.
You will get 100% of the audio. Bit perfect. And none of the DRM or need to buy this soundcard. Easy.
Comdrpopnfresh - Thursday, September 3, 2009 - link
It may very well be worthwhile trying the systems that did not work, with different drivers."The one thing both of my test platforms had in common was their NVIDIA graphics using the latest 190 series drivers. I swapped an ATI Radeon HD 4890 into the P55 board, installed its drivers and it worked right away; under both Windows Vista 32-bit and Windows 7 x64.
I’m not sure what the NVIDIA/Auzen incompatibility was, and perhaps switching to an arbitrary older driver would fix it"
The better question may be: what is the NVIDIA/Creative imcompatibility?
This seems eerily similar to the problems with X-Fi sound cards and Nvidia- problems dating back to the NF4 chipset. It didn't matter what driver one used with the sound, or graphics, cards. The result was SCP- snap, crackle, pop (the S being an ear-bleeding scream/shriek for some). Creative insisted it was a IRQ sharing, or latency handling issue with Nvidia's chipset. But the story kept changing as the problem persisted:
Running in SLI was to blame, then customer overclocking, use of Nvidia graphics cards on Nvidia motherboards in general, the PCI bus- switching to PCI-e was to cure it, placing the sound card too near to a graphics card, placing it near EMI sources generally within the computer anywhere, memory configurations, driver version on both sides, improperly seated soundcards, lack of EMI shielding...
The problem has spanned so many generations of motherboards, soundcards, graphics cards, drivers, OS's, and X-Fi soundcards; That it takes hours just to scroll through the troubleshooting/problem thread (scroll, not read) on Creative's own forums. It got so large, infact, that the moderators had to lock the first thread and continue the discussion in an entirely different one.
The ironic thing, for me at least, is when I read this on page 2:
"The first jumper block lets you configure how the video signal gets sent to the X-Fi HTHD: either video HDMI input on the back of the card or over the PCIe bus. Apparently NVIDIA and Auzentech have been working on a way to pass video (or audio) over the PCIe bus instead of an external cable. This feature doesn't appear to work on any NVIDIA chipsets today, but it may at some point in the future (or with a future NVIDIA chipset)."
I thought to myself- "Nvidia and Auzentech developed a way to pass audio or video over the PCI-e bus... but the feature doesn't work; as both companies are finding it impossible to work around the dumb, deaf, and blind licensing-elephant in the room."
Then I read about the failure on the next page. Typical Creative.
Automaticman - Thursday, September 3, 2009 - link
"The first jumper block lets you configure how the video signal gets sent to the X-Fi HTHD: either video HDMI input on the back of the card or over the PCIe bus. Apparently NVIDIA and Auzentech have been working on a way to pass video (or audio) over the PCIe bus instead of an external cable. This feature doesn't appear to work on any NVIDIA chipsets today, but it may at some point in the future (or with a future NVIDIA chipset)."The card is not designed to pass video over the PCIe bus. If you look more closely at the card you will see an SLI connector at the top. I still don't think they have it working yet, and of course, you need to get the card working with NVIDIA in general first. The internal video jumper certainly isn't going to work without and SLI connector attached, though.
In an earlier press release they did specify that it was for NVIDIA and not an ATI Crossfire connector.
Personally, once I saw the card was priced over $100 more than the ASUS HDAV slim card and did not come with software (ASUS includes TMT2 - not win7 compatable but I didn't find that out 'til later) I went ahead and picked up the ASUS. It works fine, but they need to make it more set-and-forget.
Crittias - Wednesday, September 2, 2009 - link
Anand mentions on the last page of the article that there are plenty of open source projects with UIs that completely outclass PowerDVD. Could someone elaborate on some of these options for me?Fallen Kell - Thursday, September 3, 2009 - link
MediaPortal+StreamedMP skin/pluginhttp://www.team-mediaportal.com/">http://www.team-mediaportal.com/
http://forum.team-mediaportal.com/streamedmp-301/">http://forum.team-mediaportal.com/streamedmp-301/
VLC
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/">http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
Media Player Classic - Home Cinema
http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net/
MPlayer
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/news.html">http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/news.html
sprockkets - Thursday, September 3, 2009 - link
Those are nice, but have no native bluray support :(sprockkets - Thursday, September 3, 2009 - link
Yeah, the XBMC project.http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=3630&am...">http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=3630&am...
bersl2 - Wednesday, September 2, 2009 - link
"Encryption legend"?This is the (n+1)th time bringing this up, I'm sure, but that particular legend made me nauseous.