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Auzentech HomeTheater HD Preview: Bitstreaming True HD/DTS-HD MA

 by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 2, 2009 12:00 AM EST
76 Comments | Add A Comment
76 Comments

The First Attempt: Failure

This was the email I sent Auzentech after spending a full day with the card trying to get it to work:

I've been working with the Auzen Z-Fi HomeTheater HD card for most of the past 24 hours and thus far I have not been able to get it to reliably work in the vast majority of situations. Here's what I've tried:

Under Windows 7 x64

1) On a Zotac GeForce 9300 motherboard with integrated graphics I get no video output from the Auzen card on my Westinghouse LVM-42w2 42" LCD.
2) On an Intel P55 motherboard with GeForce GTX 280 graphics card I get no video output from the Auzen card on my Westinghouse LVM-42w2 42" LCD.
3) On a Zotac GeForce 9300 motherboard with integrated graphics I get no video output from the Auzen card in my home theater setup: Integra DTC-9.8 preprocessor + JVC RS2 projector.

Under Windows Vista 32-bit:

1) On an Intel P55 motherboard with GeForce GTX 280 graphics card I am limited to 720p output from the Auzen card on my Westinghouse LVM-42w2 42" LCD. Selecting 1080p simply produces no-signal on the Westinghouse.
2) On an Intel P55 motherboard with GeForce GTX 280 graphics card I get no video output from the Auzen card in my home theater setup: Integra DTC-9.8 preprocessor + JVC RS2 projector.
3) On an Intel P55 motherboard with GeForce GTX 280 graphics card I get no video output from the Auzen card in my secondary home theater setup: Onkyo TX-SR806 receiver + Samsung 50" TV.
4) On an Intel P55 motherboard with GeForce GTX 280 graphics card I get no video output from the Auzen card on my Toshiba 42" Regza LCD TV.

In all cases I confirmed that both the LED lights (HDMI in and HDMI out) were illuminated. I tried both an HDMI cable from the GPU to the Auzen card as well as DVI-to-HDMI from the GPU to the Auzen card, neither worked. I even tried the internal HDMI passthrough jumper on the NVIDIA chipset to no avail. I used the drivers off of the CD that came with the card and then installed the updated drivers you sent Gary.

I was ready to give up on it. I went to bed, finished up The SSD Relapse the next day and tried one last thing before I gave up on it again: switch to a non-NVIDIA card.

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 but with a working setup I wasn’t about to try and figure it out. For what it’s worth, the NVIDIA/Auzentech combo did work perfectly on my Dell WFP3008 30” display; too bad it doesn’t have a built in receiver to make that useful.

The Second Attempt: Success

With an AMD GPU on the P55 board everything worked perfectly; I took the system sans case down to my theater, hooked it up and threw on a couple of BDs. I hadn’t seen Die Hard in a while and it has a DTS-HD MA track, so I popped that in to verify that it was working.

There are some UI bugs with the PowerDVD 9 control panel that enables bitstreaming these codecs. You basically have to select your audio output settings twice to get it to work; change your audio output once to something other than bitstreaming then once more to bitstreaming (Non-decoded high-definition audio to external device) to make it work.

Once playing, the thing worked as advertised:

Update: As readers have correctly pointed out it looks like PowerDVD is reporting its output incorrectly, but the card is functioning as intended here. It would be impossible to down-sample the compressed True HD/DTS-HD MA streams without decoding them. It also looks like the audio bitrate in The Hunt for Red October is being incorrectly reported.

Next up we have a Blu-ray of The Hunt for Red October, this time a TrueHD disc:

Let’s...Get...Busy Final Words
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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.com

    Just 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/plugin
    http://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.
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