I mentioned in passing that I'm designing a line of computers for sale to local customers of the company I work for. I've been playing with a prototype of the first box. Since no one here is local; I figure I'll pass along the parts list if anyone wants to put together their own.

Zotac IONITX-D-E (Motherboard & CPU)
AOpen S145 (Case)
Crucial CT2KIT25664AA800 (4GB RAM)
Seagate ST3500418AS (500 GB Hard Drive)
Pioneer DVR-TS08 (DVD Writer)

I'm running the Windows 7 RTM on it now, and it works very well. The HDMI out on the motherboard supports 8-channel (7.1) sound, so it's connected to my receiver, and then the receiver to the TV to function as a monitor. Been listening to Rhapsody music service, and Netflix steaming video almost every day. The chipset on the motherboard is actually fast enough to decode Blu-rays, but a slim BD drive would add 50% to the price. Oh, when playing a Netflix video with the Silverlight plug-in, scaled to full screen the machine is pulling 45 Watts from the wall, as reported by a Kill-A-Watt. Not bad at all. It's also virtually silent, the fan in the side of the case, and the one in the power supply can't be heard when I'm more than 3 feet away.

Very cool. I may be building a few workstations in the near term (open a new facility on Jan 1). I'll bug you then. My only concern is networking them (and building a server) and how I can mess that up on a self-build. You convinced me it is certainly doable for a stand-alone setup, think this is wise?

I pretty much only build servers. Both for in house, and other local businesses. They're no harder than a workstation. It's this little $400 machine which was the challenge (to keep from spending more money). I'd like to get it down to $300 in parts, but less than 4 GB of RAM and performance starts to suffer, a smaller hard drive only saves $10-20.

The onboard video must do hardware decoding if it can handle bluray. There is also still a challenge in finding software that will properly handle the DHCP stuff. The most stable player out there is actually from Slysoft.

Yes, it is the nVidia ION chipset (video/audio/memory controller/north&south bridge) which handles the video decoding. The DHCP encryption is handed by that chip too, as part of the AV processing. There's a second sound chip on board for the optical and analog outs. I thought most people these days were using ArcSoft TotalMedia Theater for Blu-ray playback.

Its been a while since I read up on all this, but all the legal commercial software offerings seem to have issues of some sort related to HDCP. Maybe thats just if you want HD audio??

Its too damn complicated. I don't understand whay they couldn't just take the whole damn audio/video stream and pass it through encrypted. Instead, you need both a protected audio and video path to get HD audio and video out the other end.

Anyway, thats a cool little rig you have laid out.

It is still difficult (impossible?) to bitstream HD audio, but with the audio decoding being done by the same chip which does the video and HDCP it is now possible to get HD LPCM. This is only the second second solution to this problem to be developed, and the other was exclusive to a single manufacturer.

I actually discovered this board because I was looking for a solution to the HDCP multichannel audio + video from an HDMI port.

Its not impossible, just expensive cause you need a separate audio card for the protected audio path. My needs are simple: to legally play a bluray without buying yet another appliance.

As I was saying, this chipset presents a protected audio path. I just don't have a Blu-ray drive to test the media playback with, but I could probably install ArcSoft's player, and "find" some BD .m2ts files to see if I can pass the bitstream.

Though from other posts here, I'm opposed to bitsteaming, it was a hack born out of the lack of hardware support in the Laser Disc days, that continued through DVDs, but its time has come to an end. With BD's doing live mixing of various audio information, and DSP bugs like the DTS bomb, it just makes sense to do the decoding in the easily (and frequently) upgraded player and just pass the LPCM to the receiver.

But... but... but then receivers could be cheaper!

So you are able to send HD audio over HDMI? The spec only lists 5.1

The nVidia HDMI audio interface is 7.1, 24-bit, 192 kHz capable. The onboard sound chip only does 5.1. That handles the optical and analog ports. Both are available at the same time, but since they are presented as separate sound cards, a program would have to open and write to both in order for both to produce sound simultaneously. Most software won't do that, so you have to choose the default. Although it does allow one to hook up a mic for recording on one card while playing back through the other, which is nice and wouldn't work with an HDMI only setup.

Here are two screen shots I just took on the machine to show how the sound control panel looks:





It does appear that it can only bitsteam Dolby Digital, but I'm alright with that. And wrt your other post, yes, I told my boss at work to go with a lesser receiver which didn't support the HD codecs, but still offered HDMI sound to save money. But that doesn't seem to be an option much any more, because they all (needlessly) have added the support.

OK, that makes sense. If it were able to bit-stream HD it would be all over the net. Interestingly the ATI 5 series of cards appear to be able to bit-stream HD. WOHOOOO!!! I've been waiting for this. The info is buried in the middle of an article on anandtech from 3 weeks ago. I missed it at the time.

The low end cards are due Oct. 23. I would imagine that OEM mobos with this chipset onboard will be out Q1 or Q2 2010.

Since I already have the decoding capability in my avr, I don't want to have to pay for yet another component, the player, to decode.

Looks like I might not be buying a PS3 for Christmas.

Part of my aversion to doing the decoding in the AVR is the loss of some of the features of BD which can only be utilized if the audio is decoded to LPCM first. BDs can allow custom live remixing of channels, dynamically lowering the volume of the main program to mix in commentary on the fly, and while not that wonderful of a feature the playback of wave files in the BD-Java for interactive sound effects for games or menus laid over the movie. None of that is possible if the decoding is done outside of the player.

That's another reason I've passed on Oppo's first player. It doesn't have the power to decode the full resolution audio steam and mix in the secondary audio. It instead falls back to the lossy steam, decodes that to LPCM and then does the mixing.

Interestingly enough the slim PS3 when bitstreaming quickly switches to LPCM decoding when asked to do any mixing, it can do this without a full HDMI handshake, and only a little blip in the audio. That's the same as what I've observed with the HDMI sound from this computer. It can change channel counts and rates without upsetting the picture.