[nowayback]

Hi,

I recently added a ASUS Xonar DX sound card to my PC as the onboard card's audio quality (noise) degraded over the past years.
The new sound card works nice in all programs I tested (Windows Media Player, VLC, mplayer, 3D games, etc.). However, when playing anything with audio (that is movies, live TV, mp3's, GUI sounds, etc.) in XBMC, I hear shattering noise over my PC speakers. I already tried to play with the available settings in XBMC, windows audio control and in the driver's software. I am using a 5.1 system, but also a test with a plain 2.0 configuration does not change anything (well, less bass provided by the noise...). I updated DirectX, the audio driver and my graphics driver to the latest available version - without success.

For me, the noise sounds like a format / encoding problem. I recorded a song played with Windows Media Player and XBMC so that you can also hear the difference. I recorded both using stereo-mix which already captures the sound issue. I uploaded it to Frodo_12.3_vs_ASUS_Xonar_DX.mp3. Warning: first part (Windows Media Player) is quite quiet, second part (XBMC) rather loud. Mind that I played the file with both players consecutively - I did not interrupt the recording nor changed audio volumes/settings etc. in between.

The xbmc log with debug output: http://pastebin.com/w1419S11
// Edit: in the logged session, XBMC was initialized with the onboard sound. It was playing the audio file correctly. During the session, I changed the output device to the Xonar DX.

My system:
ASUS A8NSLI deluxe
AMD64 3500+
Nvidia Geforce 6600GT
Windows XP 32bit professional SP3
XBMC Frodo 12.3 (consequently...)

Desired operation:
5.1 analog output (5.1 system is directly connected to the respective sound card)

Looking forward to any hint. I googled much, but it seems I'm quite lonely with this issue.

Thanks!

[jjd-uk]

Sorry but Frodo v12.3 is no longer supported, particularly for cases like this involving audio since the audio core system has been totally replaced since then, you'll need to upgrade from Win XP in order to install Helix v14.2

[nowayback]

Thanks for your answer. In the meanwhile I tested Kodibuntu on my system which has shown an even slight better video performance, and audio has been working fine. Win10 does not run under my system (due to missing CPU instruction sets), but I managed to install Windows 7 for testing purposes. Audio is actually working now, but both XBMC 12.3 and Kodi 14.2 are no longer able to play videos smoothly; even standard SD files consume 100% CPU (instead of about 60% under XP).

So... time for a new PC ;-P
Again, thanks for your help.

[jjd-uk]

Are you using DXVA hardware acceleration is offload the video decoding to the GPU?

[nowayback]

Well, on Windows 7, I already installed the latest graphics driver and DirectX. DXVA2 supported is activated in Kodi, but it seems my graphics card does not support DXVA2. The "o"-key info display gives "dc:ff-h264" both under 14.2 and 12.3
Windows 7's WMP already draws 40% CPU usage on my system just for playing a normal mp3 file without any visualization, so I guess the performance loss is completely due to the OS (XP: 5%).

(FYI, Eden works with Xonar DX under Windows XP.)

[nowayback]

Problem fixed
On Windows XP, the audio hardware acceleration setting is set to maximum per default. By setting it to minimum, Frodo 12.3 gets rid of this sound problem, while the audio quality remains at the same (high) level for other programs.

This screenshot might help other people with a similar sound issue:



Thanks again jjd-uk for your help. This thread can be closed.