spdif pass-through frequent interrupts after seeking in the file...

[nip]

Hi!

Here is what bugs me out and with what I need your help to tackle with.

The setup:
External USB sound card Philips PSC805 Aurilium with spdif pass-through capabilities hooked to a laptop with enough processing power (PIV 2,8 GHz, 1 GB RAM...) and a receiver.

Playing ac3 / dts audio files, or video files with ac3 / dts sound is problem free with software decoding even if seeking in the file.

It works just as fine with spdif pass-through, the receiver recognizes the stream, etc... until I try to seek back and forth in the file. After this point there is still sound, the receiver still recognizes the stream but the sound is being interrupted frequently. If I play the file from the beginning to the end without seeking everything is problem free - no interrupts at all.

The soft player setup - MPC 6.5.8.9 and Ac3 filter v 1.01a rc5.
(When I try to use the internal ac3 / dts decoders in MPC they work perfectly in soft decoding but if I select SPDIF it is much worse than with AC3 Filter. There are tons more interrupts of the sound and even without seeking - in fact it is impossible to listen - too many and too frequent interrupts).


A few observations:

Tried with older versions of MPC - no change in regard to internal decoders and AC3 Filter.

When I get these annoying interrupts I noticed that the Breaks and Silence stats of the buffer of the Default DirectSound Device both increase with each interrupt.

(Default DirectSound Device -> Advanced Tab ->Buffer Info)
At the same time Buffer fullness is very often stuck to 38% and in some rare occasions varies between 30-50%.
Normally - when there are no interrupts it wiggles around 90%.

I tried Default WaveOut device, but spdif doesn't function with it.

Ok, one last thing because I realize that my post gets annoyingly long.

After a seek when I have the interrupts I noticed that one cure which doesn't always work but helps is to disable spdif pass-through in AC3 Filter and re-enable it again.

Some initialization issue maybe?!



Any ideas / comments are very welcome!

Thanks in advance!

[nip]

I found a solution which is not universal but still works for me, so I decided to post it in case someone else has similar troubles and bumps in this thread.

I suspect the problems is driver related, but since there is only one version of the drivers available for this sound card there is nothing much I could do about it and the only way was to find a work-around.

As I wrote above everything's fine when I play a file initially - the problem appears when I try to seek, pause/play, etc. I guess it is some kind of initialization issue, etc. and I realized that I was trying to find a solution in many different ways but the simplest one.
I just figured out that since “play” and then “seek” is a problematic sequence and that since only “play” is fine, then instead of playing and trying to seek the right sequence would be “stop” “seek” and then start playback (which triggers the "correct" initialization) from the desired position.

It is a little bit inconvenient in comparison with the usual way to do seeking but still it is a solution of my problem - there are no sound interrupts when I seek in stopped mode and then hit play, so I'm happy with it.

Regards,