[yanathin]

Hey guys, I'm building myself a gaming rig that's going to double as a HTPC, and I want to make absolute sure that I have what I need in order to get some awesome 5.1 DTS sound sent to my Denon receiver. First off, it'll be running Windows 7. I was looking into sound cards at first, but then I found that a lot of motherboards have built-in DTS capabilities. I was looking at the ASUS P8Z77-V, which features something called "DTS connect" and uses the Realtek ALC892 codec. If I plug in via optical to my Denon receiver, will this play back my MKV files in XBMC with DTS encoded 5.1 audio?

I'm also going to have a GTX 670 graphics card with HDMI-out and it would be nice to have 5.1 audio pass through that HDMI port as well, but I'm not sure if that's possible. Has anybody done something like this before? And if it DOES work this way, would I need to spend the extra money on a motherboard with DTS capabilities if it's going to pass through the 670 GPU? I'm a little lost on what I need and I'd really appreciate the help. Thank you!!

EDIT: OR, going back to the first MB, they offer a cheaper one that uses the ALC892 codec without the "DTS connect" specification, but it still says it would output 8-channel HD audio through optical. Will XBMC be able to play DTS encoded audio with this motherboard?

[danielha]

Yanathin,

Any motherboard equiped with optical output will be OK. You can configure XBMC to use the optical output from the motherboard and be sure that your amplifier will decode the DTS encoded streams from your videos. Signal will not be decoded by the onboard codec and my guess is that M. Denon is more qualified in this matter

As far as HDMI audio is concerned, my onkyo amplifier is not able (not willing ?) to decode audio streams (I guess for copy protection concerns). I don't know if this is limited to this model or a more general rule.

Daniel