[cartman1337]

Can you try what happens with the Live CD? Won't mess with your hard drive.

Yup, I've now done some testing with the Live CD. With the default audio settings I didn't get any audio at all, in any mode. After fiddling around with the audio settings for about 15 minutes I finally got DTS work in passthrough mode - and as you know, DTS has always worked in Windows too. But even when I got the settings to work with DTS, there was still no audio with Dolby Digital.

I might add, as I guess it's important, that at the beginning, with the default settings when I didn't get any sort of audio at all, I'd get a message in the bottom of the screen that XBMC failed to initialize audio device. When I got the DTS passthrough to work that message disappeared, and it didn't show up when playing Dolby Digital material either, even though there was no audio.

I can also add that after I got the DTS passthrough to work I still got the "failed to initialize audio device" when trying to switch to analog audio. In other words, I NEVER got analog audio to work with the Live CD, with ANY audio setting. But that's not really that important, I guess, it was the passthrough we wanted to check, right? Still, I wanted to mention it.

In conclusion; the problem is as real in Ubuntu (which the Live CD runs) as it is in Windows. Perhaps even more so, since I never even got analog audio to work...

Sidenote: the ATI driver on the Live CD also had problems with the video part of the card, showing the XBMC window in a underscanned window with black borders around the whole screen.