HD-DVD Audio Support?

[Silvers24]

I been wondering about this, the only way for me to enjoy watching HD-DVD
is either through the Xbox 360 (Via HDMI) or through the Computer.

But am I getting the full audio when playing through the 360???????
I watched Harry Potter 4, and after setting the Reference Levels (Which I didn't know what it was at the time) to Intermediate (As expanded just is TO rich) so I noticed a huge picture change.
I tried switching the Audio from DD 5.1 to the TrueHD it supports, and I didn't notice ANYTHING diffrent?

Now, I only own 29 HD, and 73 BD, and all my BD is through the PS3, and when swtching to the Lossless audio, I notice huge diffrences, but not so with the HD-DVD.

My HTR is HT-IS100
Is it the 360 that is limited????????

[brandonandtiff]

The XBOX360 HD-DVD addon doesn't support Dolby TrueHD, unfortunately

[hostchecker]

unfortunately no...

[BozQ]

What the Xbox 360 does is to to take all the newer HD audio codecs, compress it to Dolby Digital 640kbps (and I believe there is also an option to compress it to DTS 1.5Mbps) and then output via Optical Cable.
As far as I know, there hasn't been a way to output Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD with Optical Cable. Even the newer Xbox 360, with HDMI is still not capable of doing that.

[vertigo]

There will never be a way to do True-HD via optical, it doesn't have the band width to accomodate it. As far as via HDMI, I doubt we will ever see that. Microsoft would have to pay millions in order to put the codec on via an update, and since HD DVDs aren't in production in US, it is unlikely that they would be willing to shell out the money.

[Arturo Lugo]

So, in theory, if I select the DTS output on the HD DVD audio settings, and select the Dolby Digital Plus track on a disc, I will hear the same information but under a DTS masquerade? Or it won't matter because it will switch back to standard Dolby Digital, and then sent the sound as DTS?

What would be the best way to extract the audio from an HD DVD on the Xbox360, then? Does it make any difference, audio wise, to use an HDMI equipped Xbox vs. using an optical cable with an old Xbox 360 console?

[MAMON]

However it should be noted that if any post processing is done in the AVR, such as speaker sizing, distance, bass management and any "soundfields" then it will no doubt be done in the digital domain and therefore the first thing the AVR will do to an analog input is convert it to digital. So this in effect adds additional layers of analog to digital and digital to analog processing.

Or you can still let the player do all the decoding but instead of converting to analog send it to your AVR via a HDMI connection as PCM. The advantage of this is that you're already (or should be) using HDMI for the video so it saves using six (or perhaps even eight) additional analog leads.

The third method, providing your player supports it is to simply output the audio from the player as a bitstream (raw digital data stream) and use the decoders (if present) in the AVR. This is popular with some people because they get to see the audio format displayed on the front panel of their AVR's rather than just a generic "Multi-channel". Apart from that and depending on the quality of your player and/or AVR there may, or may not be any advantages to using this method.

Supporting the use of this last method is a suggestion that HDMI is prone to jitter (although evidently the lastest spec HDMI 1.3a fixes this issue) and that this isn't good when sending PCM whereas it isn't a problem when you send bitstream via HDMI. The jury is still out on this one though as the effects of possible excessive jitter on a multi-channel movie soundtrack may not be that noticeable.

And to add further confussion to this topic is a suggestion by at least one person that works for Dolby Labs and had a fair bit to do with the development of TrueHD is that it's better to decode in the player as it takes some of the processing load of the AVR. For the record I bitstream from my XE-1 (because that's what it does) and I send PCM from my PS3 (because that's what it does) and they both sound fine.