On Wed, Jan 25, 2006 at 09:34:24PM +0000, Tony Houghton wrote: > I've heard of an "AC3 passthrough" feature. Does that mean the sound > card decodes the audio stream instead of the CPU? Although I don't have > a surround system ATM, I think it would be a nice feature to have in > case I install one later. Meanwhile, would AC3 passthrough work for > stereo AC3 streams? That means it passes the AC3 out the SPDIF port of the sound card so that an external AC3 decoder (say a Dolby DP564) can decode the audio. > So what would be a good card to get? I've heard that the Turtle Beach > Santa Cruz is supposed to be very good, and I know it is supported by > Linux, but I haven't been able to find out how well or whether it's > likely to fix the A/V sync. I should be able to get one (or two) on eBay > at a reasonable price. You haven't given a price range. Personally, the MAudio 2496s seem pretty nice. But, I don't know that any card is going to automatically fix your problems. As someone else asked, you need to describe the sync problems in more detail. Is it a fixed offset? Is it steadily drifting in one direction (i.e. the audio is sync at the beginning, but after 1 minute is 1/2 second off, 2 minutes it is a second off, etc). Is it wobbling (sometimes in sync, sometimes not, moving back and forth? Just to run through what I've used recently, I've used the SiS sound on a Shuttle (crappy sound quality, but it doesn't have sync problems), the sound in a Centrino chipset (not too bad, and still no sync problems), a MAudio 2496 (I like them, but maybe overkill for you, and still no sync problems), a SB Live 5.1 Gamer card, and a SB Audigy card (both also without sync problems). All with mplayer (I prefer mplayer and find it to more flexible than xine, although in someway not as nice for playing DVDs as xine is). -- Joshua D. Boyd jdboyd@xxxxxxxxxx http://www.jdboyd.net/ http://www.joshuaboyd.org/
