spdif

eee box b202, ac3 and 720p x264 playback second try

Wednesday, November 5th, 2008 | Gadgets, Tech-savvy | No Comments

Installed VLC, enabled SPDIF pass through, played back an AC3 file, got choppy sound. Bad. :roll:

I did not bother to play around with the configuration, this was just a 5 minute out of the box test.

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eee box b202, ac3 and 720p x264 playback first try

Tuesday, November 4th, 2008 | Gadgets, Tech-savvy | No Comments

After what seemed to be an eternity I am finally possessing my new toy, an ASUS eee box b202. Reasons for this gadget were

  • enough power for 720p x264 playback
  • SPDIF out
  • HDMI out
  • (almost) no power consumption
  • silent
  • small
  • cheap

For me this is the perfect solution for a media pc. Or a home server. Or a desktop (I don’t play games). Just love it ;)

I want to start with the media pc. Finally I have a digital connection to my receiver!! (party) This also concludes that the eee pc 901 has no optical out – even though the specs said so. Using the eee box I can really see the light coming out of the hybrid audio plug. Even though the connection works, I could not get any AC3 pass through sound out of mplayer:

Sample format big endian AC3 not yet supported

Bollocks! Even though I don’t like it, I tried Windows Media Player with an AC3 decoder plug-in and it worked. G, now I have my super “I play everything”-mplayer that chokes on pass through digital sound … I hope I’ll get this up and running, I don’t want to fall back to WMP.

Next is the HDMI out. Tried to connect that to my telly ending up with a f*cked up resolution. Giving the TV it’s native resolution it still tries to interpolate 720p thus scaling the native resolution down to something that would fit into 720p. Anyway, I just ended up connection the good old VGA again. Maybe I’ll find a solution for this later.

As you can see, now I have digital video and digital audio but I can’t make use of either one. The video connection doesn’t bother me, the VGA signal is fine on my TV. I just have to make digital pass though work in mplayer (or VLC resp.) and I am good to go.

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eee pc 901, AC3 audio and dolby digital

Wednesday, September 24th, 2008 | Gadgets, Tech-savvy | 1 Comment

This post is just intended to find someone that has managed to connect her/his ASUS eeepc 901 or 1000H respectively to an AV receiver getting AC3 5.1 digital sound out of it.

The adds for the eee series say that the eee 901/1000H (and eeebox B202) have a digital out sound option. But it is nowhere to be found HOW to connect the darn thing to a receiver. I figured one should maybe use a TOSLINK connection like the one shown in the picture, because one of the audio plug sockets (either mic or headphone) can be switched between analog or digital mode (the fricking software not giving me the option to switch at all). Whatever, I have no idea if this is right (or even possible), I just wrote this nonsense to have a few audio/eeepc related keywords here, so that maybe someone googling finds this post and gives me the solution to my problem.

The eeepc is capable of 720p x264 playback. Come on, I don’t want to be left with a stereo signal, even if Dolby Digital Live is pimping it… :?

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