MPlayer and eac3 to pcm - how?

[Carpo]

I have been backing up my movies and have been keeping the HD audio as i intend to get a HD receiver sometime in the future, and i am just wondering if the information here - http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=129050 - is still the way to do it or if there is another way to get mplayer to stream the audio as pcm, as the receiver will play that just fine.

I am aware of the other option of re-ripping and remuxing them with .ac3 audio, although there are only a few movies with eac3 audio, it would still be a bit of a pain

[boykillsworld]

For high def audio I use XBMC.

It will take eac3 convert it to pcm and output perfectly. Sorry, I don't know the command for mplayer.

I know XBMC is a little high end on the resources but considering your going to need a descent graphics card just to output 7.1 pcm it's not much of a stretch. I would stay away from geforce 8xxx and 9xxx as they have channel mapping issues and sometimes don't support 5.1 audio but support 7.1 so if it receives 5.1 it downmixes it to 2.0. I suggest an Asus EN 210. It works out of the box as long as ALSA is set to use it as the primary card.

http://wiki.xbmc.org/?title=HOW-TO_set_up_HDMI_audio_on_nVidia_GeForce_G210%2C_GT220%2C_or_GT240

I am starting my own HTPC OS with xbmc build in. It's still alpha until I enable an update repo but it's getting there.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/webbhtpc/



To my knowledge no ATI card can do HD audio but people were working on a fix.

[Carpo]

Thanks, will read the links later :)