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Posts tagged SPDIF
SPDIFKeepAlive 1.2
Jan 15th
I finally got around to fixing the auto play on start-up problem. The reason it took so long was because I was trying to perfect the auto restart option:
Sometimes when an AC3 file is played or something that takes control of the sound card SPDIFkeepAlive gets stopped. The auto restart option restarts playback every 3 seconds. This means that shortly after AC3 playback stops SPDIFKeepAlive resumes automatically.
Unfortunately I’ve still not got it working properly, at least not for me, depending on your sound card / driver you might get better results. But be warned, on my system after a random amount of time (~1 hour) I get a terrible noise produced by SpdifKeepAlive and I have to exit, hence I don’t use this feature! I’ll try to fix it sometime. I think I’ll need to use threading and play 2 files that continuously overlap.
You can download the new version at the bottom of the SPDIFKeepAlive Post
SPDIF KeepAlive for Home Theatre PC
May 10th
After building a new Home Theatre PC I’ve discovered that the onboard IDT audio has a problem with the SPDIF output, or at least my Sony receiver has a problem with it! Every time a sound is played it causes the SPDIF input on the receiver to initialise which takes about 500 milliseconds, after the sound has finished the SPDIF goes back to sleep. As a result the first 500ms is lost off every sound that is played; not really a problem if you’re watching a movie but for applications that have little blips as you navigate around these sounds tend to get missed altogether; such is the case in MediaPortal the HTPC application I use.
My old motherboard with Nforce sound didn’t have this problem the SPDIF remained “active” all the time.
After much searching I did find a few other people with the same problem but no solution so I’ve written a small .NET application called SPDIFKeepAlive. It does just that. It sits in the system tray and continuously plays a silent wave file to keep SPDIF port active.
Hope this is helpful for others, leave comments for bugs / feature requests etc
Version History
Version 1.0
- Initial release
Version 1.1
- Added new output options
Version 1.2 (Current Version)
- Fixed auto play on startup
- Added auto-restart option
(.Net 2.0 Required)