On 13/05/2009, at 3:08 AM, Rafał Miłecki wrote:
I consider myself far from being audiophile, but there IS difference between analog single-jack signal and digital signal with nice audio receiver.
I concur. Most analogue audio out of computer is crap. If you playing into the speaker of your computer monitor or into a little desktop speaker system, then it doesn't matter, since such speaker systems are crappier. I have a semi-professional quality sound card in my computer, rated to better than 100dB signal-to-noise ratio on the analogue, playing into a decent stereo system. That's reasonable - but a CD ripped on the computer (into FLAC lossless codec) and played back through that sound card is still not as good quality sound as playing the original CD directly in the audio CD player of the stereo sound system. Also some of the opensource audio codec decoders are of dubious quality. I am not overly impressed with the AC3 decoding in mplayer (i think it now uses a libavcodec decoder) and AAC decoding (using FAAD2; the libavcodec AAC decoder doesn't work on any of my files) often produces quite erroneous sound. I'm looking forward to being able to export the digital content out via HDMI into a decent audio processor.
If I have to _choose_ between high-end audio with broken video, or traditional audio and _working_ video playback, I sure know where my vote is.
And my vote is with the audio! Indeed, I have already exercised that vote: I watch my video/DVDs on a lowly computer monitor, but have spent money on a decent sound card and separates hi-fi quality sound system. I am now spending even more money on the sound system but still don't see a reason to upgrade the computer monitor. I admit I am a little unusual in this respect!
I don't think using audio in HDMI actually affects video playback. Didn't notice that ever.
IIRC, the audio is encoded in the video blanking period of the video signal. It should not affect the video whatsoever.
So it's really hard to play full HD material on ATI :(
Yeah, it's a bummer. I have a DVB-T card in my computer to receive the NZ Freeview TV broadcast. It's MPEG4 (i.e. h264 and AAC) which is very computationally intensive to decode. My computer cannot manage it - not even at standard definition TV (though I may one day optimise some of the ffmpeg libavcodec code for my computer architecture which might just get me SDTV playback but definitely not HDTV). So at the moment I listen to the radio programmes recorded from the DVB-T card, and can't watch the TV broadcasts. Yeah, I know I could upgrade the computer but why do that when I can spend the money on upgrading my sound system? Michael. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: radeonhd+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: radeonhd+help@opensuse.org