Now that I’ve moved most of my music onto my music box, I’ve been looking at the possibility of building my own surround decoder, a fantasy which has quickly led me into a void of tools: there is very little in the way of PC hardware and open source software to help. The lack of open source software I can understand, as Dolby is obviously a proprietary format. But the dearth of hardware is more surprising — so far I haven’t been able to find a single pro or semi-pro hardware decoder card that does Dolby Digital. Creative Labs have a few Dolby-compatible cards/drivers, but they’re really designed for gaming (tiny plugs! tiny plugs!), and besides I would prefer to have the decoding and DAC functions on separate cards so I can mix and match performance and capabilities.
So for the moment I’m stuck. I haven’t really had time to play with building a software-only solution using say gstreamer, and anyway suspect that even if it worked, I would rapidly run into latency issues. Any ideas on hardware?
the people at diyaudio.com seem to think the best (hardware-based) approach, is to simply rip the dolby-licensed chips out of something that’s cheap or dead, and build up from them — but diyaudio is a very circuitcellar-style circuit-level site. still wondering if there’s a boards and OS-level solution (i want protocols, not knobs)
Comment by darrell — Tuesday 17 August 2004 @ 6:07 pm