Clarkdale H55 WMC Passthrough Oddity

[dburckh]

I just got an MSI H55-E33 MB to replace my doggy ION setup.  It absolutely rocks.  HD Audio Passthrough from PowerDVD 9 is the stuff, baby.  Rocket fast.

Now for the weirdness.  If I do AC3 passthrough (e.g. ATSC WTV), WMC crashes and dies, but WMP plays the same file just fine.  I though they used the same codebase?  I’ve got like 600MB free in task manager and the box isn’t spiking a core.

All drivers, firmware and software are current and official (No Warez)

I worked around it by disabling the MS driver (which does passthrough by default) and using ffdshow tryouts with on machine decoding for AC3.  It works, but it was a PITA.

Anybody else seeing these issues?

Machine Specs:
MSI H55-E33
Core i3-540
2x 1GB Micron DDR3 13333
30GB Vertex SSD (ACHI-boot)
2TB WD (ACHI-data)

Software:
W7 x86
PowerDVD 9
MediaBrower
HuluPlugin
DaemonTools Lite

Other:
Denon AVR-3311CI
Panasonic AE4000U

[Mike Garcen]

i’m on an Intel H55 board setup, and i can play my ATSC WTV files with AC3 just fine. i should note i’m on x64 Win7, although taht shouldn’t matter.

so to confirm, if you try to watch LIVE TV on your WMC then it crashes? What if you enable SP/DIF instead of passthrough with the HDMI, does it process the DD signal?

[dburckh]

Good to hear that things are working!  Even with my current handicap, this thing rocks!

I don’t have a tuner card on this box.  I was trying to watch the show off of another machine (via GBE).  I could not get it to work, so I copied it locally.  Same issue. 

I’ll give SPDIF a shot.  It would be disappointing, but I may be able to rig it so so I can get HD Audio through the HDMI (PowerDVD) and SD Audio (DirectShow) through SPDIF.

Even wierder, the family is watching a dts show via HDMI right now (mkv).  No issues.  I would think that would get hosed up as well.

I am beginning to wonder if it might be WTV or a specific sequence that corrupts the driver.  I kept trying the same show, over and over.  I don’t have a lot of AC-3 that isn’t WTV, most of the stuff is HD DVD rips (eac3 or dts).

Anyway, I have to wait for them to go to bed before I play with it.  I’ll rip a DVD and give it a shot later tonight.

[Mike Garcen]

sorry, by SPDIF i didn’t mean actually connecting the SPDIF cable, but just selecting hte checkbox in the audio panel.

[dburckh]

Does not matter.  Freakiness of freakiness, it is now working.

I’m not sure of WMC or Windows updated, or somehow falling back to the Microsoft AHCI driver did it (yet another issue, the 2TB HDD is not waking up all the time), but it is working now.

I’ll just be the boy who cried wolf for a while.  Thanks for your help.

[dburckh]

Arg.  It’s back.  I can’t figure out what combination of things makes it work or not work.

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