I have tried to read through some of this thread, but I don’t understand much about this topic. My situation is this:
I have the MKV files for the first 2 movies on my computer. My computer has an HDMI out slot. I play one of the files in VLC on my computer, plug an hdmi cable into a receiver, which puts my computer screen on my tv. When the movie is played, it looks and sounds surprisingly good on my tv (surprising because I didn’t know how else to play these files on my tv, but noticed my old desktop does in fact have an hdmi slot).
So I am wondering if my method is not the preferred one, if peoples’ computers just don’t have hdmi slots, or if there’s some better way of doing this process?
And also, does anyone know off hand what the optimal settings would be in VLC and/or my receiver for playing this? On my test run I believe I switched the sound on VLC to 5.1, and my receiver to 7 channel audio. (btw this is not my receiver and tv, and I know little about this stuff).
As it seems I’ve been championing, outputting straight to your TV/receiver through HDMI is a great method until nicely polished BD versions are available. If you want to get the most out of this kind of setup, though, you’ll want to look into how to “passthrough” HD audio to the receiver. I’m not sure how adept VLC is at that, versus just decoding the audio itself, so I’d recommend looking up (I’m assuming you’re on Windows, here) how to do passthrough audio with players like MPC-HC and Kodi. At the very least for Kodi I know you have to change some settings in Windows to use WASAPI rather than directsound to properly passthrough the full HD audio track, rather than core DTS, or worse decoding locally. http://kodi.wiki/view/Windows_audio