Damn, damn, damn! I just paid good cash for a Creative SoundBlaster Live! 5.1, not to mention the money for the subwoofer and the speakers. And you know what? I can't get any DVDs to play through the SB in anything but stereo! So I got a simple question: How can I make the Hollywood+ play DVDs through the Live! 5.1 card in actual 5.1 sound?
Weeell, after a lot of searching I found some tidbits about this very issue. First off, in version 1.7 of the Hollywood+ drivers, Sigma Designs or RealMagic (or whover makes the drivers for the Hollywood+ card) removed the support for 5.1 output to a sound card using software (they refered to 5.1 as "6-channel" sound.)
Why? They quote copyright/patent issues. I guess that's understandable. Backtracking a bit: DVDGenie (the zone-changer) used to allow you to change the registry to enable the "6-channel output to soundcard" option. This didn't work with the drivers I had installed (v1.8.1) and I suppose it won't work with any newer versions, either.
OK, OK. Sorry for the long discussion, but that last paragraph was the only useful info I found after about 2 hours of searchings. Everything else I found: dead ends, cries for help from others with the same problem, and many many more pages simply containing all the keywords and not a drop of info. And as the saying goes, the last place I looked was where I found what I was looking for. (Obviously, since I stopped looking, eh?)
The solution is a program called "SoundSelector". It modifies the registry to change the audio output destination of your Hollywood+ card. The options are:
I've used the second one, after connecting the onboard audio-out of the Hollywood+ to the onboard "Aux In" of the SoundBlaster Live! 5.1. As far as I can tell, it worked. Basically, it changes two values in the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Sigma Designs\REALmagic\13 key:
| name | type | default value | value for 5.1 through SBLive |
|---|---|---|---|
| EnableDac | dword | 1 | 0 |
| EnableWaveSpdif | dword | 0 | 1 |
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