Rhys Goodwin

This is/was one of my blogs. Just a few bits and pieces - IT, woodwork, metalwork, electronics, DIY, technology articles and anything else I might be currently interested in and get around to documenting.

There might be some broken things because this site was converted roughly from Wordpress to jekyll.

My main area of interest these days is political party innovation which I’m building a project for at oneaction.nz

1 minute read

Optical SPDIF Connector

**Update**

I suggest you look at Veg’s SoundKeeper tool first and see if it does what you need. It looks like a much cleaner and more efficient tool than mine (which is now nearly 10 years old! :o). Nice work Veg.

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.

SPDIFKeepAlive Settings

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

Downloads

SPDIFKeepAlive-1.2.exe (.Net 2.0 Required)

Source Code – Feel free to do what you like with this (no license)
SPDIFKeepAlive-Source-v1.2.zip

Updated: