PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

Hi,

I own a Creamware Powerpulsar Card (+A16 breakout box)which is hooked up to a PC running XP SP1. I am trying to get the Pulsar card to play back 5.1 surround from a Windows based DVD player. So far I have tried WinDVD Plat and Theatre Tek but both programs only allow you to select one stereo channel. So despite the fact I have multipe stereo Creamware (which can be routed to the required speaker) there is no way to get the DVD player to route it's multichannel output to these.

Anyone got any ideas?

it has been discussed years ago and there seems to be a workaround to get the playback going.
Nevertheless it never caught big attention as most people interested wanted to encode too, not only to decode.

The (proper) codec comes with a HEAVY license fee that is out of reach for a company like CWA. It's that fee that makes the respective version of Nuendo that expensive (for example).

I dunno how 'open' or 'detailed' those software DVD players decode the audio part.
They could just pass it on to 'regular' soundcards, that have the decoder as part of their chipset.
The same is done in SFP with the digital wave source that you connect (in the routing window) to one of the digital outputs to pass it to an external decoder (home entertainment amp etc) for further processing.

The 'workaround' (as I remember it, but that's not very reliable) uses the '16 wave interleaved source' and 'convinces' the software DVD player to use it as it's destination.
This depends on the capabilities of the respective player of course.

As mentioned, some may be able to only pass the digital stream on (no matter if internal or external), they don't open the stream.

Some players may be able to do exactly that, which means that they need the proper license, so I wouldn't exactly expect this in the freebie range of things.

cheers, tom

oops, welcome on board, btw

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: astroman on 2005-11-25 02:25 ]</font>

Cheers, thanks for the information. I don't want to route to an external decoder as this would mean unplug/replug equipment. I'm happy to pay a bit more to get some software that will do the decoding.But I'll certainly try the workaround suggested.

Thanks

Dave