New to media center. Apologies for the long post - I wanted to include details about what's happened and what I've done already. I am looking to get rid of my cable equipment and replace it with an HTPC running WMC. I've got all my equipment in my profile. I had purchased a Ceton InfiniTV 6 Eth and played with that for a couple weeks on my "old clunker" PC and everything ran well. I went ahead did some research and shopping, and built my own HTPC a few weeks back. To say things haven't gone smoothly would be an understatement, but through a lot of Googling and reading on this board, I've got it mostly working now. I definitely hadn't anticipated some of the nuances of hooking it up to a receiver and a projector.
My two biggest problems were audio and video (which is really just about everything, isn't it?) I had initially intended to bring the audio from the PC to my receiver via the HDMI cable. My cable provider (WOW) has Dolby Digital audio, and I had intended to just pass this through. This worked fine until the day I decided to try and hook up my Belkin @TV (Slingbox knock off) using the analog audio out from the PC. Sound switched to stereo, and no amount of tinkering ever got it back. I reinstalled Win 7 and still couldn't get the sound to be anything other than two-channel stereo, so I picked up a digital optical cable Friday and ran audio through that. WOW. Amazing improvement. I do have one question on this though. When I turn to a channel, it says Dolby Digital on the screen (which is what WOW sends, but the Realtek audio in the PC is outputting DTS, and DTS is what shows up on the receiver. Is this a problem? Is the PC converting DD to DTS, and does it matter? I will say this: it sounds a lot better than it did when the cable box was hooked up and it was DD. I'm pleased with the sound, but am curious what those with more knowledge in this area have to say about this set up, and if there's any way to just pass the DD signal WOW sends without modifying it. I wear hearing aids at the ripe old age of 48, so I'm not always the best judge of good audio.
The current problem I have been unable to solve is stuttering video on my premium channels. It's not on every movie, but I can't seem to identify a pattern. I'm using the Intel HD 4600 graphics, and I've found all sorts of threads on the 59/29 "bug" and what setting to change to solve it (turning off Contrast Enhancement in the advance settings is supposed to fix this). There is a setting right below that called "Film Mode Detection" that I've tried both on and off, but it doesn't resolve the problem either. The problem isn't quite as bad with Contract Enhancement off, but it's still there. I have video going from the HTPC to the reciever via HDMI, and then via HDMI from the receiver to the projector. There's also a blue ray player hooked to the receiver. Projector only has one HDMI input, so switching is done by the receiver. Some movies recorded on my premium channels have the stutter, and some recorded movies don't. Sometimes I get it on live TV, and sometimes I don't. If a movie does it, it does it consistently for the entire movie. It looks like frames are dropped every few seconds. This is driving me nuts, and it's keeping me from plunking down the cash for an Xbox 360 to use as an extender. System bios is up to date, and all drivers are up to date, too.
Last question. When I switched the audio over to digital, I went into the bios and shut off the audio over HDMI since I wasn't going to use it. Play Ready started tossing up errors on some channels, but not all. Turning the audio over HDMI back on seems to have resolved this problem. Is Play Ready really THAT sensitive to changes?
Thanks!
Gary
