Vista Tutorial - Playing the "Digital Input" through the Speakers...

So yea, a friend of mine got me an Xbox 360 for my birthday, however I have no speakers and my monitor does not play audio (so any audio through HDMI is not an option).

So, as a result, I bought a optical audio cable for the Digital Input (S/PDIF input), and then played it back through the speakers... however this was on Windows 7 RC1, since formatting back to Vista Ultimate 64bit (Was testing it to see if it fixed some problems), I do not have an option to play the Digital Input through the Speakers anymore (There used to be a volume control for it on the Speakers properties inside of the Vista sound settings, but it's gone now).



I am using this motherboard: ( Universal abit > Motherboard, Digital Speakers, iDome, AirPace, Multimedia ) with the drivers provided by them (It's onboard and uses the Realtek HD audio drivers, thats all I remember since I built it).

Anyway, so far the only way I have been able to hear the Digital Input is to play the device through VLC using "Open Capture Device", which has a lag delay (Which is enough to throw sounds off by almost a second or so, which is fairly annoying in a multiplayer game).

I heard somewhere this was caused my Vista having stupid DRM causing it to not work, but I hope this is not the case... I can't get speakers or any of that any time soon, so im making this post as a last resort before I dual-boot Windows 7 and Vista.

Thanks.

Edit: Even with the drivers from the sticky above it did not solve anything. Same problem, can't find a way to play the Digital Input (S/P DIF In) through my headset (Which is the speakers option on my sound output settings).

very strange, i had this problem, my audio on my dell doesn't play so I had to purchase a VGA HD cable for my 360, this cable has RCA outputs instead of optical output, and also a jack adaptor to connect to a standard jack input on your pc, personally i like using that and you can set your own resolution compared to the HDMI cable. You may want to look into this cable > Xbox 360 VGA HD AV Cable Review (Xbox 360) < plus I am aware the resolutions are shown on this website, there has been an update to allow all standard pc resolutions including 1080p

Sorry, some stuff has been happening, ended up losing track of this post until I found it in my bookmarks :/

yea, I will have to look into that - is there no way to make it work? I really don't have any spare money to put into more hardware/cables/etc right now :/

Thanks for the info, though, I will look into one once I can afford to get it. I might just go dual-boot windows 7 though, it's in RC1 for quite a while from what I understand. Only reason I don't is due to active web design projects (I hate having to setup all my crap again, it's not hard, just gets tedious).

Anyway, thanks again. And sorry for losing track of the post, I will remember it this time

ok, keep the existing setup, but open up the sound settings and right click on the recording devices , show disabled devices and enable the stereo mix.

Well, I already have that enabled (I use it over skype sometimes, I generally keep that enabled).

However, I am not quite sure where you want me to go with it, though? The Stereo Mix is for playing what I would be hearing (Eg: Music playing on VLC), through an input device (Such as my Microphone) as such that it could be played over skype (for example).

My problem is that I have no speakers (Aside from a headset, which can't plug into the xbox 360) so I can't hook any speakers up to the xbox (Even if I did, I am not sure how it would work with just regular computer speakers), and my monitor does not play sound, so the HDMI sound won't work. Now, on Windows 7 RC1, all I had to do was go to "Speakers" properties (My headset), and set the volume level on the Digital Input playback, so that it played what is coming through the digital input in my headset. This produced lagless sound from the Xbox and allowing me to set it all up without having to spend money on more stuff. So the problem that comes in is the fact that Windows Vista (Ultimate SP2, tried it on no SP and SP1 as well) does not have an option to set the volume on the digital input playback in the Speakers properties, it's just gone. So the only thing I can do to play the sound from the Digital Input is to have VLC play the Digital Input audio device, however this has a lag as I believe it is not streaming it, but rather caching it every (x) ms, and so it lags (I decreased the cache time and it did make it more realtime, but it also added some weird static noise that would occure every time it cached).

So basically, Vista doesn't have an option to allow me to play the Digital Input through the headset (Which is not digital), and VLC lags due to it caching and not streaming in realtime. And Windows 7 has the option to do it, so I know it can be done, it just seems to be limited by Vista or drivers interacting with Vista.

have you tried setting the digital output through the realtek control panel?

Um.... I thank you for your replies, but, I am really unsure as to what there is to set?

I am not *quite* sure if your understanding me correctly, but I Don't have a Digital Output, my speakers are through the normal headset jacks (Realtek HD Audio). Doing this would not benefit me at all from what I can tell, however, yes, I have looked at it before just to see if there was something that might. The only *potentially* useful thing I saw was the S/PDIF-In to S/PDIF-Out pass through, which won't really help me considering I don't have a digital output (S/PDIF-Out). So unless there is a way to have it play the Digital Output through the headset jacks (speakers / Realtek HD Audio) instead of the actual Digital Output port, I don't think that would do much right now.

Again, on Windows 7, I had it playing the Digital Input through the Speakers (Realtek HD Audio Device/headset jack ports (The small colored ones)) by setting the Digital Input playback volume in the Speakers sound properties, however in Vista this setting is gone.

Again, thanks for your replies