TiVo Community Forums Archives - Digital Audio in Tivo!

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Digital Audio in Tivo!
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Posted by: webboi

I'm a little curious why Tivo2 does not support digital audio in/out (coax or optical). Anyone have any solutions to get the best audio quality?

Posted by: edc

Go with DirecTV and get a DirecTiVo... :)

Posted by: ajacques

quote:
Originally posted by webboi
I'm a little curious why Tivo2 does not support digital audio in/out (coax or optical). Anyone have any solutions to get the best audio quality?

Tivo could fix this by offering/supporting a usb digital audio dongle. It would just pass the digital signal out the usb port.

There are some on the market.

Posted by: Krellis

quote:
Originally posted by webboi
I'm a little curious why Tivo2 does not support digital audio in/out (coax or optical). Anyone have any solutions to get the best audio quality?

I believe the reasoning is related to copyright/digital rights management stuff - TiVo has a lot of ties to TV content providers, etc, and digital output is one of those things that they don't like, because it lets you take the content out to somewhere they can't control it.

Good quality analog audio and s-video cables should get you Good Enough quality - it's TV, after all, and since TiVo doesn't (yet?) support HDTV, going digital won't gain you all that much anyway. (Even my digital cable box won't give me a digital output, I don't know about others...)

Posted by: David Platt

quote:
Originally posted by ajacques
Tivo could fix this by offering/supporting a usb digital audio dongle. It would just pass the digital signal out the usb port.

There are some on the market.

But the TiVo's audio ins are analog; there's no way to get the digital signal into the box...

Posted by: jsmeeker

I think the big issue is that there aren't many broadcasters/cable companies *Sending* digital audio. It doesn't happen OTA or analog cable. Not sure with digital cable, but I suspect it's spotty at best and would require a cable box with dgital out (do they even exist?).

Why build in a feature if very few can take advantage of it??

Posted by: mmascari

I have had 2 different model Scientific Atlanta cable boxes with digital audio out. Coax to be specific, although you can buy coax to optical converters at Radio shack and other places. Many digital cable selections say available with Dolby Digital sound, but I haven't tried it yet. (I need a new receiver first.)

Matt

Posted by: alansh

My cable box has a digital audio out jack, but it only works on the music channels (I don't have HBO so I can't check that).

Keep in mind that even if your cable box outputs digital audio for all channels, the source provided to the cable company will be analog in most cases.

Posted by: hawkamer

quote:
Originally posted by jsmeeker
Not sure with digital cable, but I suspect it's spotty at best and would require a cable box with dgital out (do they even exist?).

Yep, that's how digital cable works; the cable box provides the digital out-- coax, usually, as is the case with the digital boxes provided by Time Warner in my area. I usually get 2 channel Dolby digital on most digital channels, plus 5.1 on many movie channels.

You're right in that digital cable is but a small percentage of all cable subscribers. I think that's the main reason SA TiVos don't support digital output. Also, there might be technical problems of recording a digital output stream and passing that through untouched. Directv/TiVos have it easy in that respect, everything comes nicely packaged.

Posted by: rickertk

Even with digital cable, many digital cable boxes do not have a digital out. The Motorola DCT-2000 has digital audio out available only as an option; at least in my area, the boxes that Comcast deploys do not have digital audio out. (Serial ports are hit and miss; no idea if they are able to be used or not, some of the boxes do have them but the one we currently have does not).

Keith

Posted by: jeffk

I sure wish the series 2 supported this. As my Scientific Atlanta has a coax out, and most movies on the pay channels broadcast in dolby digital 5.1 for anythign fairly recent, and it sounds great [cinemax doesn't though], but hbo, showtime, starz and tmc do [and their multi channels]. I just have it hookedup to video2 to get this now, so if I really want to see a movie in dolby digital I bypass the tivo.

Jeff

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