getting surround sound on AV with Windows 8.1

Question

OS: Windows 8.1 64bit M/B: Asus M4A88T-M A/V Receiver: DENON AVR-2308

I recently upgraded my (home-built) HTPC to Windows 8.1 (64bit). Since then im unable to get surround sound over to my A/V receiver. The receiver only ever displays the L&R speakers as the channels its getting.

I downloaded and installed the latest Audio drivers from Asus and somewhat surprisingly they already had a 8.1 edition.

I use BS Player to watch videos and have been for the last few years and never had a problem. BS Player also downloads the necessary codecs for me and again, it always worked in the past.

In the past (windows 8, windows 7), I would see the AC3Filter icon in the tray and would get surround audio by configuring the AC3Filter to pass through everything and by putting the receiver on DIRECT mode so it would just use the format it receives from its input.

Now however, whenever i play a video i only get the FFDshow filter screen which doesnt seem to do anything. No matter which properties i try to turn on or off.

Looking at the Audio device properties in Windows i only get the Stereo option, And in the properties for the device i dont get any supported formats:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/c02z3kkffmr7ei2/audio-properties.png

I dont think i ever got more than the Stereo option in the audio properties but that never seemed to be a problem either because i would get full surround sound passed to the receiver.

When im playing a video encoded with DTS, by default I see when i hover over the ffdshow audio decoder tray icon:

Input: DTS, 5.1, 48000 Hz, 1536 kbps (libdts)
Output: PCM, stereo, 48000 Hz, 16-bit integer

When i turn off the Mixer option in the ffdshow options screen, i get this:

Input: DTS, 5.1, 48000 Hz, 1536 kbps (libdts)
Output: PCM, 5.1, 48000 Hz, 16-bit integer

If I try to change the options in the Output screen, to pass-through DTS I lose the sound completely.

In any case, the receiver keeps displaying only the two channels and nothing more.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/xctzfakdzlm7cgk/audio-ffdshow-output.png

I've spent a lot of time trying different combinations of settings and nothing seems to help. Any idea?

Thanks, Yoav

Answer 1

I always shied away from codec packs but after having problems with subtitles in WMC I found Shark007.

I use this on my Win 8.1 x64 HTPC via optical to my amp and everything works great.

Here is his guide for configuring for WMC which includes audio settings for HD audio passthrough:

http://shark007.net/forum/Thread-Advanced-settings-with-subtitles-in-almost-all-video-formats-and-MCP-use-possible