Originally Posted by PurpleAngel
If your on a computer and using it as the source of a video, of any kind, using a software program like Windows Media Player or VLC, or Media Player classic, etc. it's going to automatically convert the bitstream (compressed audio) to PCM, before it's sent thru a HDMI cable.As I would assume computers can only process PCM, not bitstream.
So I would assume when your playing a music files, like FLAC or AAC and using a program like Foobar2000, Win Amp, Windows media player, VLC, Media Player Classic, etc, if it's outputed from any digital output on the computer, like HDMI, or USB or S/PDIF, it's going to be PCM.
PCM is just one stage of the decode process for any digital file storage format. The great thing about computers is that they are so versatile. As long as you can write software to tell it how to do something, it can do that something. So unlike with a receiver, which requires a hardware chip to tell it how to decode FLAC, AAC, DTS, etc, with a PC you just need some software to tell it how to decode the DTS or w/e stream.
Generally, you'd have something like mp3/flac/dts (a52)/aac be the compressed storage medium. it gets decompressed to PCM, which is your straight up 1's and 0's which represent the analog waveform itself rather than just some clever repackaging method. There is no information present in PCM except for the analog waveform itself, and you need to make sure your sample rate and bit depth settings are correctly handled or this part makes no sense to your hardware. This is what gets decoded to an analog wave and then amplified.
On one hand, you are KIND OF right. computers, at the end of the day, turn everything to PCM and send it to a DAC. but you are incorrect in thinking that they cant handle anything else. They can handle anything. In software, they can do the conversion themselves to PCM.
For a receiver, it can accept this PCM signal straight off the wire, or it can accept the prior product in the signal path: the actual compressed (flac, aac, mp3, dts, etc) file. For DTS in particular, they have been designed for this.
So to put this incredibly simply, there are 2 ways i should be able to visualize my data on my receiver. Either my receiver should tell me that the input is "PCM 3/2/.1" or it should tell me the input is "DTS 3/2/.1" or whatever other codec is being passed to it. Right now, the computer is doing ALL of the software processing. With an optical cable, you can do s/pdif pass-through. with an hdmi cable and XBMC, you can do HDMI pass-through (bitstreaming, when available). with VLC, you cant do that.
I'm going to try out KCP this weekend and see if thata offers what i want. VLC used to be a fantastic program when it played every format without complaining about it. Now it seems to just get in the way of output.