HTPC - HDMI - Lossless audio fiasco

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Robert_E

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I just bought a ATI 4000 series screencard with the intention of passing the HD audio formats via HDMI to a receiver that can decode those formats.

Guess what? The screencard cannot pass DTS-MA and DD-THD to the amp, instead everything gets decoded on the PC and then the uncompressed PCM is sent out via the HDMI connection only.

<a href="http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3411">This article</a> explains it nicely.
(EDIT: How do I embed a URL on this forum ?)

I wondered what the reasoning was behind the Asus Xonar HDMI audio cards if you could just pass the HD audio out via the screencard. And now I know.

Damn the DRM and encryption schemes they built into blu-ray!
 
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