[Phantom]

Hi all,

I'm looking into building a Full-HD (video+audio) HTPC, I'm used to XBMC on the xbox since day1 so logically my first choice goes back to XBMC but on a more powerfull platform.

What I'm looking into is the audio part, is audio bitstreaming over HDMI already supported, and is there any advantage over Spdif or Coax?

And what would be the best hardware to get, a bit futureproof, to get a Full-HD HTPC running, I might do some gaming on it. (for the gaming part I was looking into 2 Ati 4850 boards in CrossfireX.

Thanks all

[ShortySco]

I know that audio over HDMI is not really supported as such, but i don't know if anyone has gotten it to work in XBMC itself, i have read about people getting it to work under lkinux itself.

From the reading i've done, i'm led to believe that the majority (All?) motherboards that have HDMI audio can only pass stereo audio through, rather than 5.1 - 7.1 channel HD audio.

The website for my motherboard (Abit I-N73HD) says it supports multi cannel audio over HDMI, but i'm not convinced that means 7.1 (2.0 is multichannel too!)

The benifits that i'm aware of is that it is the only way to fully take advantage of the HD-DVD/Bluray HD audio codecs, spdif and co-ax only carry upto 5.1 sound i believe.

What hardware?
I'm really not the person to answer that, but it looks like you mentioned a board with ATI video.... i think ATI is least well supported in linux between them nvidia and intel, i went with nvidia personally.

Shorty

[MDPauley]

I am running XP SP3 and using Video and Audio over HDMI (See motherboard in my sig). Audio over HDMI is not supported in Linux, unless something has changed in the last 2 weeks.

[ltmon]

I am running XP SP3 and using Video and Audio over HDMI (See motherboard in my sig). Audio over HDMI is not supported in Linux, unless something has changed in the last 2 weeks.

I believe audio over HDMI works on a limited number of cards, with only very recent versions of ALSA. Specifically it seems that HDMI audio support for R700 based ATI cards exists in current ALSA development versions, if you are willing to do some compiling and patching yourself.

See http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=ne...&px=NjMzNQ