[Marty Moose]

Appologies if this is a stupid question, but I'm a newb on a steep learning curve...

I'm currently considering buying on of these to jailbreak XBMC on and put in the bedroom but...

All my media is encoded to MKV, but with only a passthru track of the main audio file from each DVD (usually 5.1). I have no downmixes of audio tracks as additional tracks on any MKV's I have.

How does this play out if I was to try and play these MKV's through XBMC straight to a TV with no amp involved in the setup? Will this hit the wall in that the Apple will be unable to decode the original source for output therefore I won't be able to get any sound from the player?

Cheers for anyone who can shed some light on the issue.

[Fergus]

XBMC will downmix it for you, unless you configure the System/Audio settings in XBMC to tell it there's a Dolby Digital amp connected!

[Marty Moose]

XBMC will downmix it for you, unless you configure the System/Audio settings in XBMC to tell it there's a Dolby Digital amp connected!

Is having to downmix from 5.1 particularly intensive on the machine to the point it may cause issues? (especially on the new 4.4.4, which is no doubt what I would end up with this late in the day).

[Memphiz]

Yeah sure. I would try to get 5.1 passthrough to the tv before letting the atv2 do the downmix work. Some TVs are able to downmix ac3 by themself. Beside that you can deactivate DTS capable receiver. This makes XBMC encapsulate the DTS into an AC3 stream. This is not much work and would allow you to decode DTS via your AC3 compatible TV too (most TVs don't decode DTS directly because of licensing issues).