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
Final Words
If you ignore the initial driver issues with NVIDIA GPUs, I was shocked by one thing about the Auzentech card: it worked without giving me any HDCP errors. I’m used to any new HT product breaking HDCP and generally not letting me watch the movies that it’s designed to play back. Auzentech was the first that didn’t do that. I had these problems with nearly every IGP chipset on the market upon their initial release, even with the ASUS Xonar HDAV when it first came out, but the Auzentech? Nope. Then again, I couldn’t get video output when I used a graphics card from one of the largest GPU makers in the world.
My personal experience with the Auzentech is mixed. It didn’t work well with my NVIDIA setups but worked flawlessly with AMD. If you feel you need a card like this and have a configuration that you know works, the X-Fi HTHD seems good enough.
That brings me to the major issue with the Auzentech X-Fi HomeTheater HD: I’m not sure these cards make sense anymore. They add another level of complexity to an already ridiculously complex set of hardware, software and security requirements needed to simply play a movie off a disc.
You need to use PowerDVD to get the real benefit from the X-Fi HTHD. Although the latest version of the player is far better than it used to be, it’s still not my preferred way to watch movies; the UI is clumsy and is easily outclassed by open source projects, which is just ridiculous given that this is an app you have to pay for.
Then we have the price. The Auzentech X-Fi HTHD will set you back around $250. For that price you’re $50 away from a PS3 Slim, which can bitstream Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD MA in full 48kHz/24-bit fashion without ever having to worry about drivers or incompatibilities. I get that the content owners were worried about enabling Blu-ray playback on PCs, but I feel that they’ve almost killed it.
It’s less painful to rip the movies and play them unencrypted or even pirate them than it is to play a legitimate Blu-ray disc on your PC. That is a problem. At least when you pirate them you get direct-to-drive service, something you can’t get legitimately for a high-bitrate movie. Those responsible for the encryption and stipulation need to pay attention here: What would you do when it’s not only cheaper, but also more user friendly to steal movies than pay for them?
Piracy shouldn’t be easier, it should just be cheaper.
9 feet of Windows 7 is admittedly nice
I do believe there are a number of reasons to opt for a HTPC over a PS3 or set-top Blu-ray player, but I’m just not convinced that there’s value in these cards. I’ve seen the roadmaps, we’ll start getting chipset support for bitstreaming these codecs next year. That’ll mean a sub-$100 investment in a motherboard for the same sort of support you get from a $250 sound card.
In the interim, we’ve got some very good options. All modern ATI GPUs, Intel IGPs and NVIDIA IGPs support decoding these lossless audio codecs in software and can send the decoded audio over HDMI. It’s called 8-channel LPCM over HDMI and it is supported all over the place now. You need a video card for your HTPC anyway, it seems the sensible route would be to rely on 8-channel LPCM support for now and upgrade to a motherboard/video card that supports bitstreaming True HD/DTS-HD MA later.
It would be different if we didn’t have to rely on Cyberlink, or if there were open source True HD/DTS-HD MA alternatives so we had playback support in things like Media Player Classic - Home Cinema or XBMC. The nature of what we’re trying to enable is also at fault for diminishing the value of these sorts of cards. Appreciating the advantage 24Mbps of audio can give you is a potentially impossible feat for most un-jaded human ears.
ASUS and Auzentech have at least made sure that PCs can at least play these audio tracks, and for that they should be commended. I’m just not sure the rest of the industry is ready to support it yet. We need better software, we need simplicity, we need integration. Deliver those things and then we can talk price.
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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.