Thread: Audio through HDMI

I need a new video card to get my old gaming box back up and running. I am going to hook it up to my TV and instead of streaming video from my current rig through my XBox360 I just want to hook this PC up directly to my TV.

A couple questions:

1) Has anyone tried audio through HDMI. I will be plugging it into a Home Theater receiver.

2) Any thoughts on this videocard:
Newegg.com - SAPPHIRE 100289VGAL Radeon HD 5670 1GB DDR3 PCI Express 2.1 x16 HDCP Ready Video Card

I did the audio/video via HDMI thing using my laptop. I hooked up directly to my TV, but that was because my parents' receiver didn't have an HDMI port. TV had built in speakers though.

I have been doing some reading, these discrete cards seem to have full Dolby Digital blah blah blah. Should be good enough for me.

make sure your recceiver will accept the audio in and doesn't act just as a pass through. My A/V receiver stupidly designed that way, and instead of the audio going to the 5.1 system in the living room, the audio just passed through straight to the TV, and the manual said it was designed that way. Had to use a separate audio connection from the computer.

If you are going to be using the video....HDMI is cool.

If it's mainly for audio....just run a fiber optic cable and be done with it.

I ran an HDMI to my home theater with visions of itunes flowing 24/7. What I discovered is that in order for it to work, I had to have my tv on (even though I ran the HDMI to my receiver). Deal breaker. I have a plasma, and don't need my desktop burned into it just so I can have itunes. Toslink ftw.

This all depends on the receiver you have. What model do you have? Is there a reason you would rather hook directly to the receiver via HDMI instead of stream? How is you TV hooked to it? There are a couple of way you can do this.

Originally Posted by Partyball

This all depends on the receiver you have. What model do you have? Is there a reason you would rather hook directly to the receiver via HDMI instead of stream? How is you TV hooked to it? There are a couple of way you can do this.

I think the problem is more on the computer side than the HT side. The HDMI out I am using is off of my vid card, so the tv has to be on in order for the cpu to recognize it as a secondary monitor. As soon as I kill the tv, the cpu no longer recognizes my HT receiver as a secondary monitor (you can hear the Windows sound for a device being disconnected as soon as the tv powers down).

The easiest solution (and probably what I should have done in the first place) is to run a fiber (digital audio only) from cpu to the receiver.

I do stream currently, the quality is not as good as it can be because some of the movies/videos/etc are not always compatible so I just transcode EVERYTHING. Which means jumping ahead or skipping ahead is really slow or non existent.