Experimental XBMC build with digital out of AC3 and DTS over SPDIF

imgresDom Cobley was again working on XBMC and the HiFiBerry Digi. There is now an experimental build that supports AC3 and DTS bitstream output. That means you can now send Dolby Digital and DTS soundtracks to your home theater amplifier over an coax or optical link.

The OpenElec build can be downloaded from here: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3669512/temp/OpenELEC-RPi.arm-devel-20140308190048-r17871-g8a2f22b.tar

Note that this is again a very experimental setup. It needed a hack in the XBMC code. This must be fixed in the ALSA driver. While we will work on this, we can’t say, when we will be able to change this.

Check out this article how to configure it. Note that for the HiFiBerry Digi you need the following module configuration:

cat >/storage/.config/modules-load.d/hifiberry.conf  <<EOF
snd_soc_bcm2708
snd_soc_bcm2708_i2s
bcm2708_dmaengine
snd_soc_wm8804
snd_soc_hifiberry_digi
EOF

11 thoughts on “Experimental XBMC build with digital out of AC3 and DTS over SPDIF

    1. Daniel Post author

      This works with dvdplayer. Not sure if omxplayer supports ALSA. However as I understand it, dvdplayer will be the replacement for omxplayer at least on Raspberry Pi in the future.

      Reply
    2. Lukasz Soltykowski

      Ok, I think t does work with dvdplayer not omxplayer. How is the performance of dvdplayer in regards to fullhd movies?

      Reply
      1. Daniel Post author

        dvdplayer seems to have some slight stuttering from time to time. I think, there is still work going on here and it will be better soon.

        Reply
    1. Olivier Devaud

      I have problems with Dolby Digital : either the sound output keeps in 2.0 or it shifts to DD and then no sound is heared. I tested many differents configurations (Output configuration set to optimised or best correspondance, many different max sampling rate) without success.

      Reply
  1. mello

    Thanks a lot guys. As expected I had to change the “settings level” to “Advanced” and then configure the passthrough settings according to my receiver. And now everything just works =)

    Reply
    1. ali

      Bonjour
      je suis novice j ai fait l acquisition du DAC HIFIBERRY Digi mais je n arrive a installe le fichier.tar
      sur la SD

      Hello
      I am a novice I did purchase the DAC HIFIBERRY Digi but I can not seem to install the file.tar
      the in SD

      Reply
  2. Daniel Post author

    Hi, this should work now in the normal OpenElec release. No need for this anymore.

    Reply

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