SPDIF and dolby digtial problems

Thanks guys. Yeah my quick brute force attempts last night failed, and my next attempt was going to be what skirge suggested(hopefully tonight), but I didn't want to sit on it all day in case there was a clear obvious solution to this.

I really haven't installed that many filters. Just the drivers for the realtek sound, in addition to their control app(which are install with the driver exe). I installed power dvd which installs its stuff. Then did the AC3 stuff, which in all fairness was done hastily, late last night when I was getting tired, so I should do it more carefully this time.

Skirge, are you suggesting I remove the cyberlink decoders? I'm not sure how that may impact HD-DVD and Bluray playback..which I haven't tested yet.

Oh--- I got my new Xgene keyboard(its the older model that's smaller), and it rocks!! I haven't put it through the paces yet as I'm more concerned about getting my system up and running properly, but having an keyboard/mouse combo is definitely a VERY useful item. I love the gyration mouse and keyboard that I have, but this will be very convenient. I'll still keep the gyration stuff around, but it won't be needed nearly as much and I'll be able to retire my old PS2 with 10foot cable to my spare parts box finally.

for DVDs, probably not. For HD-DVD and Bluray, I really have no idea but I assume so. I'm also PO'd because the price of AnyDVDHD has jumped nearly 40% because they've changed to the Euro. Its over $100 now. Should have bought it sooner-- that's a $40 mistake.

Thanks skirge01. I'd love to get to this tonight(maybe I will), but I'm going to be tied up putting together a presentation most of the the evening, so it may have to wait a while till I get to it(I'll be out of town this weekend too.. )

Sorry to revive this old thread, but I'm still having an issue here, and I'm not certain what the cause is.

I've been having problems with stuttering while watching some recordings(HD) through Sage. Basically I'll see normal playback for a few minutes and then video will slow down and occasionally skip frames. While this is happening my receiver which is connected by SPDIF optical(I've tried coax too), switches back and forth on the display between dolby digital and prologic. After some period of time the video will resume normal playback and the receiver displays dolby digital. But the problem can and usually does return after some period of time. If I stop and restart playback or skip back a few seconds I'm sometimes able to get the problem portion of video to playback fine but not always.

I've also tried to playback these recordings in VLC and zoom player. If I do not select SPDIF in VLC, the recording plays back smoothly but its only recognized as prologic. If I ask it to switch to SPDIF, then it stutters and begins the digital/prologic flipping like I see in Sage, only it will never have periods when its smooth. If I try to playback in zoom, I get the same flipping and stutter all the time no matter what I've tried.

I've reinstalled my realtek drivers without success. I'm currently using AC3 filter, and my incomplete trials with selecting cyberlink in zoomplayer didn't help. While I had been thinking this was limited to just recordings, as the few movies I've watched have been fine until this weekend when I ran into issues playing Flags of our Fathers on Bluray. The symptoms were as I described in Sage where I would get periods of perfect playback interspersed with this stuttering and flipping on the receiver. I gave up on the movie before watching it, but I had the same problems in both Cyberlink and Arcsoft players. The disc was smudgy and I'm asking for a replacement from netflix.

I'm at a loss as to what to try, although I'm going to try restoring my old XP image(before the upgrade) to a spare drive I have laying around to see if this problem is limited to vista.

That's not a bad idea, and yes I can give that a try. I still have my old parts that I've moved over and into a linux server. The spdif cable is the same that I used before, and last night I tried using digital coax which was hooked up to the digital out on my cablebox without a problem. The drive? the same one I used in my previous build, that wasn't upgraded except I formatted and installed vista. The hardware that could be bad is the motherboard with the onboard sound. If the CPU was bad, I would have noticed that already. The video card works fine seemingly, I think I would have noticed that too. Ram?

My thought is that its a problem with MPEG2 decoding. Aren't some early Bluray discs mpeg2? This could explain why I had a problem with flags of our fathers, and also having a problem playing back recorded HD. I have no issue with recorded content via my MVP150(analog cable), HD-DVD or DVD this far.