Windows 7 Dolby Digital 5.1 decoding through optical input of X-Fi Xtreme Audio

Simon b

New Member
I have recently purchased a Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Extreme Audio 7.1 PCI-E OEM card. The main reason I got this card is because I play my Xbox 360 through the monitor and speakers on my PC. I have 5.1 surround speakers for the PC, and I thought rather than playing games using the analogue stereo output from the standard RCA cables it would be awesome to take advantage of my speakers and use the Dolby Digital surround output from the Xbox (via optical TOSLINK cable).

The X-Fi card has an optical input, and from the jargon touted on the website it seemed to be able to handle Dolby Digital decoding. However when I hooked up my Xbox, I output the sound in Dolby Digital format and got an awful juddering noise, but when outputting in digital stereo, the sound is crystal clear (but not 5.1 :frown:).

I think this would suggest the card is not decoding Dolby 5.1 from the optical input. I am running Windows 7 64bit, and have downloaded the latest drivers from Creative on their website. When using the control panel there are no options for configuring the optical input and nothing to suggest there is Dolby Digital decoding at all.

Online it suggests that you need to have downloaded and installed PowerDVD to get Dolby 5.1, but there is no option in the start menu as stated to be able to do this.

Can anyone suggest how I can get this working, is this supported in Windows 7 as I know Creatives driver support is shaky at best, or is there perhaps a 3rd party option for drivers that can unlock this for me?

Any help would be much appreciated, this is my first thread so any tips on how to present info better would be cool to.
 
Hi. What happened with your problem? Could you solve it? i'm very interested to know if this works. Same card, same input. Please, could you make the card to decode the Dolby Digital for the XBOX360?. Thanks
 
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