[lozbrown85]

Hi Guys

In the Coming soon thread on the front page it says:

AC3 Encoding: An often requested feature. Thanks to gnif, realtime transcoding will soon be available.

That's lovely and I'm sure its very cool but what does it mean for us?, what will this do that it didn't do before? what's the use case?

Please don't think I'm being ungrateful, I'd just like to understand better.

Also I have and Onkyo 507 AV reciever connected to my box via SPDIF. All info seems to imply it should be able to handle most formats . I currently only have the DTS Capable ticked, but when I try and watch certain films (including films marked as DTS I get a message saying "Failed to initialise audio device" does this mean my amp can't handle DTS? Or am I doing something wrong?


Which of the following should I have set, what is my amp capable of?

• Dolby Digital capable receiver
  
• DTS capable receiver
  
• AAC capable receiver
  
• MP1 capable receiver
  
• MP2 capable receiver
  
• MP3 capable receiver
  

Any help, advice or links to good info about this stuff would be great.

[snoxbox]

That's lovely and I'm sure its very cool but what does it mean for us?, what will this do that it didn't do before? what's the use case?

I'm certainly no expert, but from what I understand, the only surround sound audio formats that can be bit-streamed to receiver (passthrough) over spdif are AC3 and DTS. That means if you are running optical or coax digital, and you play a file with 5.1 AAC or FLAC, it will be dowmixed to stereo. With AC3 encoding, the original stream is decoded in xbmc, then re-encoded as AC3, resulting in 5.1 audio again.

Not sure about your DTs issue.

[Jezz_X]

Yeah what he said. it also means for people with older amps that don't support DTS it can downmix to dolby digital so you still get proper surround

[theophile]

I hope it also means I can start ripping to 5.1 Vorbis.

[mrloofer]

Can't wait for this as it will save me major headaches converting my movies from AAC to AC3 (which currently takes me 20 mins and a multitude of applications).

Any hint as to when this will be ready?

[blittan]

as stated in the news, "when it's ready"

[bleze]

lozbrown85, sounds like an ION box running XBMC Linux with incorrect PassThrough settings

[wstewart]

your receiver can do DTS, Dolby Digital and bitstreams. Doesn't look like it does MP3 and definitely doesn't do AAC.

The big advantage of the upcoming audio will be real-time encoding of AAC to DD.

[lastimp]

Any chance that this will also mean transcoding of AAC/M4A audio to MP3 over UPnP. For example streaming to the Xbox360.

[outleradam]

Just posting here to show support to the devs. I'm very interested in seeing this come to life.

This audiophile says "Way to go Team XBMC!"

I may just start using XBMC in my car.