Problems with Blu Ray HD audio and Acer Clear Fi on the Acer Revo 100

Question

I have an Acer Revo 100 as a home media hub and want to use it to play Blu-Rays.

Unfortunately the supplied player software (called Clear.Fi) seems to have a problem. It plays the audio during the opening adverts and menus, but it goes silent once the movie starts.

I think this is due to Clear.Fi not supporting HD audio.

It would still be OK if it could play regular stereo, but there doesn't seem to be any options for it do that.

Acer's own support has been useless - their forums doesn't find Clear.Fi (it asks "Did you mean 'clear fix'?") and their phone number technician states that their proprietary Clear.Fi Blu-Ray player is not supported by them.

Is there any way to get Blu-Rays to play with lower definition audio that Clear.Fi can handle?

Is there any way to get Clear.Fi to play the HD audio?

Is there any way to get the Acer Revo 100 to play Blu-Rays with sound?

Answer 1

I have a half answer for you. I have a REVO 100 with Clear.Fi. Purchased it in Oct 2011. It played Blu-ray video and audio perfectly on the Clear.Fi player. In December 2011 I installed a recommended update for Clear.Fi and poof the audio disappeared. Same scenario as yours: it plays standard definition flawlessly and for Blu-Ray I get audio for opening credits and the menu, just not the actual feature.

So, the half answer is this: Clear.Fi does support blu-ray audio, it just appears that the latest update has a bug that has not yet been fixed.

Tech support from Acer has been unhelpful. Unfortunately, since I don't have a restore point available from before the update install, I see my only option now is to do a factory restore. I'll post again and let you know how that goes.

Answer 2

This is not a fix but a way round.

I had the same problem with my RL-100 some Blu rays had no audio play back. I think its something to do with the THX sound format and the HDMI. I used the optical audio output through a surround sound system and it works great.