We just bought some surround sound for our living room, so I wanted to get surround sound out of my Amilo laptop - digitally. My motivation was to play avi (XviD/DivX) files with AC3 sound. Ofcourse that took about a day of hard work, so to spare other people from the trouble, here is my recipe for success:

1. The S/PDIF output is hidden inside the 3.5 headphone port. It is optical, get one of these: http://www.biltema.no/products/product.asp?iSecId=535&iItemId=89253  and a toslink cable or one of these:
http://www.elfa.se/elfa-bin/dyndok.pl?dok=9375.htm, or get one of those I got (from Siba), which is either in both ends (but they break VERY easily!)

2. Open your sound card configuration, on my Amilo laptop, that is a blue icon with some sound waves on in in the taskbar. In the S/PDIF-out tab, select  ”Output digital only” to enable optical S/PDIF output.

3.  Install AC3Filter from here: http://ac3filter.net/ and the other video codecs you need to play the file.

4. Get Windows Media Player (from M$), I could not make it work in any other player, not even Media Player Classic, my favourite, for some reason.

5. Now onto the part that took me all evening - Open up the AC3Filter codec’s configuration menu, select your speaker configuration under “Output Format”, and check the “S/PDIF” checkbox. Then under the ”System” tab, choose ”Use Wave Out by default“. I got no idea why, got it from a forum somewhere… Maybe someone can explain this to me?

6. Open the file in Windows Media Player, and you should have digital surround output,  given that the video file
you open have multiple channels wrapped in AC3. Note that it is quite common with 2-channel AC3 audio on avi-files,
and that is not what you want.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 19th, 2007 at 11:03 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.