Auzentech HomeTheater HD Preview: Bitstreaming True HD/DTS-HD MA

Final Words

If you ignore the initial driver issues with NVIDIA GPUs, I was shocked by one thing about the Auzentech card: it worked without giving me any HDCP errors. I’m used to any new HT product breaking HDCP and generally not letting me watch the movies that it’s designed to play back. Auzentech was the first that didn’t do that. I had these problems with nearly every IGP chipset on the market upon their initial release, even with the ASUS Xonar HDAV when it first came out, but the Auzentech? Nope. Then again, I couldn’t get video output when I used a graphics card from one of the largest GPU makers in the world.

My personal experience with the Auzentech is mixed. It didn’t work well with my NVIDIA setups but worked flawlessly with AMD. If you feel you need a card like this and have a configuration that you know works, the X-Fi HTHD seems good enough.

That brings me to the major issue with the Auzentech X-Fi HomeTheater HD: I’m not sure these cards make sense anymore. They add another level of complexity to an already ridiculously complex set of hardware, software and security requirements needed to simply play a movie off a disc.

You need to use PowerDVD to get the real benefit from the X-Fi HTHD. Although the latest version of the player is far better than it used to be, it’s still not my preferred way to watch movies; the UI is clumsy and is easily outclassed by open source projects, which is just ridiculous given that this is an app you have to pay for.

Then we have the price. The Auzentech X-Fi HTHD will set you back around $250. For that price you’re $50 away from a PS3 Slim, which can bitstream Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD MA in full 48kHz/24-bit fashion without ever having to worry about drivers or incompatibilities. I get that the content owners were worried about enabling Blu-ray playback on PCs, but I feel that they’ve almost killed it.

It’s less painful to rip the movies and play them unencrypted or even pirate them than it is to play a legitimate Blu-ray disc on your PC. That is a problem. At least when you pirate them you get direct-to-drive service, something you can’t get legitimately for a high-bitrate movie. Those responsible for the encryption and stipulation need to pay attention here: What would you do when it’s not only cheaper, but also more user friendly to steal movies than pay for them?

Piracy shouldn’t be easier, it should just be cheaper.

9 feet of Windows 7 is admittedly nice

I do believe there are a number of reasons to opt for a HTPC over a PS3 or set-top Blu-ray player, but I’m just not convinced that there’s value in these cards. I’ve seen the roadmaps, we’ll start getting chipset support for bitstreaming these codecs next year. That’ll mean a sub-$100 investment in a motherboard for the same sort of support you get from a $250 sound card.

In the interim, we’ve got some very good options. All modern ATI GPUs, Intel IGPs and NVIDIA IGPs support decoding these lossless audio codecs in software and can send the decoded audio over HDMI. It’s called 8-channel LPCM over HDMI and it is supported all over the place now. You need a video card for your HTPC anyway, it seems the sensible route would be to rely on 8-channel LPCM support for now and upgrade to a motherboard/video card that supports bitstreaming True HD/DTS-HD MA later.

It would be different if we didn’t have to rely on Cyberlink, or if there were open source True HD/DTS-HD MA alternatives so we had playback support in things like Media Player Classic - Home Cinema or XBMC. The nature of what we’re trying to enable is also at fault for diminishing the value of these sorts of cards. Appreciating the advantage 24Mbps of audio can give you is a potentially impossible feat for most un-jaded human ears.

ASUS and Auzentech have at least made sure that PCs can at least play these audio tracks, and for that they should be commended. I’m just not sure the rest of the industry is ready to support it yet. We need better software, we need simplicity, we need integration. Deliver those things and then we can talk price.