Setup woes & frustration

[MovieBuf]

I am having great difficulty in finding info on WMC and how to set it up, specifically the audio.

I have windows 7 home prem on an Asus MA785 mobo with a 2.4 ghz quad processor, 8GB RAM, 1.5 TB disk. I use a TOSLINK to connect my mobo s/pdif to my receiver. When starting WMC I get the startup chime, the menu click sounds, etc. all play fine through the s/pdif, but nothing is output from the speaker test.

WMC provides highly limited choices in setup. My mobo alone has s/pdif and hdmi, plus my graphics card also supports htmi. How the designers decided to be so limiting is typical Microsoft.

My tuner card is a hauppauge 1600. The WinTV app that came with it is very crude in comparison to WMC, but at least it works and without much difficulty, passing digital signals straight through to the receiver for decoding. When it's in full screen mode there's really no difference, the display is the display afterall. It's the guide, the UI / UX that sets WMC apart from XBMC, MythTV etc.

So how to you select from the possible audio sources? Must one use 3rd party tools to route the audio to the desired interface? I tried to use the shark codecs but don't understand them or the forum that discusses how to use them. When they talk about menus I'm not sure what the context is; it doesn't seem to be in the shark codec tool or WMC.

I'm surprised I don't find tons of info with a simple google search; I find very little useful info out there for such a major Microsoft app, not even on Microsoft.com.

I've tried many searches here and elsewhere but am at a loss on how to get this working. Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.!
Thanks

[ogiewon]

Hmmm...so I assume you've got HDMI from your video card to the TV? And Toslink from the MB to the receiver? Is that correct?

If so, please make sure you have the drivers for your motherboards onboard audio are installed. You're then going to need to go into the Control Panel->Sound applet and make sure you select the onboard sound card's Toslink Digital Audio output as your default Playback Device. Windows basically has three sound devices to choose from with your system - the onboard audio, the video card's HDMI, and the motherboard's HDMI. You have to tell Windows which one is the primary device. Otherwise, Windows will usually guess the HDMI connection. I assume your receiver does not support HDMI? I find it much simpler to feed everything through the receiver via HDMI and then have just one connection to the TV. Good Luck!

[Mike88]

I use SPDIF from mobo to AVR and HDMI from the video card. Initially the SPDIF would disable whenever the HTPC was in sleep mode for a few hours. IIRC it was crawfish on this forum that suggested using the Microsoft audio drivers. So I rolled back the audio drivers to get the MS version & it worked. I'd have to check all my settings but having Windows set to SPDIF output comes to mind.

I have never installed any third party codecs because I never had a need to. You might want to try the default MS audio driver.

[MovieBuf]

I use a DVI output to drive the HDMI input on my projector through a DVI-HDMI adaptor. That link is not used for audio, only video.

If I did not have drivers for my hardware installed I would not have functional audio, but I indeed do - just not for digital bitstream audio from WMC. I have no exclamation point symbols in the device manager.

I have the S/PDIF selected as the default sound device in the control panel, which is why I hear most everything (except it seems the WMC bitstream audio) through the toslink. I am using the microsoft drivers. There are however more than 3 devices for sound output: 1) analog output from mobo, 2) s/pdif out on mobo, 3) hdmi out on mobo and 4) hdmi out from NVIDIA graphics card.

I tried the shark codec / tools when I read others solved similar issues with WMC. They're very complicated and I couldn't find info about them I could make sense of so I uninstalled them.

The issue is that there are many possible configurations of hardware but Microsoft in their infinite wisdom tried to oversimplify the UI and determine the best device choice which is not correct for my hardware. My hope is there is a registry setting or something similar that can be changed to feed all audio through the S/PDIF. I may be wrong but I believe the shark codec tool provides a means of mixing / routing digital audio streams as well as analog audio, including which codecs are used. The website gets into talking about "containers" (i.e. file formats like ogg, mp3 etc), but I am confused why those have any bearing on sound routing and processing.

[LuckyDay]

So if you go to playback devices in CP and disable everything except S/PDIF you still don't get it to output?

[MovieBuf]

I went back to the control panel and all playback devices were disabled except s/pdif and one of the hdmi, so I disabled the hdmi leaving only the s/pdif. Same problem.

When I run the speaker test I choose the 5.1 option (I also tried the 7.1 option, same result). When I click the test button the receiver switches to dolby digital 2,0, I hear a brief tick but nothing else. When I tune a station with WinTV that broadcasts in HD I get a dolby digital 3,2 and I get a blue light on the receiver indicating it's decoder is processing the digital data. I've forgotten what the numbers in parens mean, but it has to do with how many channels are decoded. I believe the 2,0 means only dolby stereo, thus no blue decoder light. My receiver is a Sony STR-DE935.

[MovieBuf]

Well I finally overcame the issue, no thanks to M$.

For anyone with a less than typical configuration that experiences similar problems, I highly recommend the shark codec tools mentioned above. One email and the short answer came back with the solution.

There are many tabs and settings on the shark setup / configuration UI, and checking the box "Shark recommended" didn't resolve the issue. In my case I had to go to the "swap" tab and disable the Microsoft codecs. Once I did that everything worked!

Hope that info helps anyone else facing the same problem. You can download the shark codec tools (claimed to be the last and only codec you'll ever need) from here: http://www.shark007.net/

[Shark007]

One email and the short answer came back with the solution.

you're welcome.
EDIT: To add, I advised that he disable only the Microsoft Audio decoder as the Video decoder is required for LiveTV.
Disabling only the Audio decoder doesnt break LiveTV playback.

[MovieBuf]

Interesting. This just illustrates the degree of complexity involved.

The reply Shark007 provided by email was: "On the SWAP TAB, disable the Microsoft Audio decoder".

I have a 64 bit system. The 32 bit interface differs from the 64 bit version in the swap tab choices. I failed to do as instructed as I disabled both audio and video codecs with the two check boxes on the swap tab of the 64 bit settings, but since no video check box is available on the swap tab of the 32 bit interface the microsoft video codecs are still enabled as displayed on the left side of the dialog.

What's interesting is that live TV works just fine on my 64 bit system, even with the disabled 64 bit microsoft video codecs. However, I did have trouble playing some videos in my library. Not sure if that is due to my erroneous setting or not, but I'll change it and give it a try.