2011-02-06, 14:12
kulprit Wrote:I always thought what made the most sense for dual audio output was 2 different streams. ie, hdmi to receiver and through to zone 1 (watch movie in living room), optical from htpc to receiver to zone 2 (outdoor speakers playing music). Not sure if this is possible either.
This would be one scenario. There are more that come into my mind.
1. What you mentioned
2. Similar to (1.). Personally I often have some video running, e.g. a documentation. In such situations it would be nice to play music instead of the audio track of the video. Not really a kind of dual output but somehow related. (e.g. play video -> move to music -> play track -> dialog pops up asking one to play the music stream instead of the video audio track -> enjoy video plus individual audio playback)
3. Some people hook up different outputs to different devices for different purposes.
This could be:
- HDMI to AVR for passing through AC3/DTS (Homecinema)
+
- Toslink or Cinch to Stereo Amp (Music)
-> No Problem so far. But for flexibility it would be nice to have the stereo stream on the two selected outputs at the same time. Nobody needs passthrough on a device that isn't capable of decoding it (Stereo Amp, TV, etc.)
As I read on previous posts this seems to be a developer's nightmare. But would it be possible for (3.) to take another way. What comes into my mind is to change the output device on the fly. E.g. by right clicking a music track one could select "play over hdmi" or "play over toslink", etc. In a situation where playback has already been started one could select another device via osd. (playback already running -> select new output device -> xbmc remembers current position of track -> xbmc stops track -> xbmc switches to new device -> xbmc continues playback at stored position -> playback over new device starts).