Sounds like your DVD player only has stereo out. Therefore a surround output would need to be synthesised.

There are boxes which do this which you can buy from HiFi retailers. I think they are referred to as surround decoders. You should check that they can perform this function though.

Anyone here using a computer as a media center? not just as juke, but watching and recording tv on it?

It seems so wasteful, because the poster's DVD player is missing some features, so either he has to buy some box that will convert SPDIF to 5.1 which will probably not do a great job of it, or he can throw the DVD player away and upgrade.

That's where the computer / media center is nice. you can upgrade and not have to throw away everything.

it is called (as Rodabod said) a surround sound decoder. this is not a new thing. there were cheap, super-fancy, and middle-tier decoders at least 5 years ago, probably even more.

this function would generally be handled by a receiver... one with surround decoding built in. the advantage of a surround receiver is that it's all in one box: all your audio and video signal selection and routing, the decoding of digital info into analog, and the amplification. you just need sources (DVD, satellite, cable, etc) and speakers. and a screen.

there are two advantages I know of in favor of a separate surround decoder. first, there is a likelihood that the components and processing will be better than they would in a receiver, where decoding is just one of many functions. and second, if the format changes (like it did when they introduced 7.1 years ago) you can either upgrade or replace the decoder, rather than the whole receiver, and stay hip to the new technologies as they're rolled out. in the case of 7.1, I seem to recall Proceed having a card upgrade for their surround decoder, and after that all you'd need is another 2 channels of amplification.

FWIW, I use a computer running XP Media Center Edition as my teevee. the big drawback there is the more-or-less loss of the computer as a computer. I mean, it still works as a computer. but hard disk space disappears into thin air, system resources are tied up to whatever extent anytime you're recording or watching teevee. if you power it down, or it powers down for whatever reason, it won't record until it's restarted.

I don't even have mine hooked up to anything except for the feed from the cable teevee, the stereo, and the teevee itself. that right there is enough to make moving the computer around a bit of a pain. hooking it into a surround system would increase that just a little more.

that being said, I love having my computer be my tivo. it's a laptop, so anywhere I take it, I can show people the part in the episode of SNL where queens of the stone age played a song ("little sister" I think it's called) and will ferrell came out and played cowbell a la the "more cowbell" skit with christoper walken. that's always nice.

if I was looking for a surround decoder, me personally, i'd start with Sony. aside from sony being the "S" in SPDIF (Philips is the "P"), I've had Sony computers, cameras, cd players, cassette walkman back in the day, you name it, and i'm still down with them after 20 years or whatever. they haven't screwed me yet.

the only fancy one I remember from when I was very up-to-date on this stuff is Proceed. I think their surround decoder cost about 600 million dollars back in 99. i'm exaggerating, but...

marcosharko wrote:I have SPDIF outputs (one coax and one optical) from my DVD player and my cable set top box but the surround sound input to my older receiver is discreet 5.1. Is there some hardware conversion available to handle this? Ideally this converter would handle multiple inputs.

Are you sure it's SPDIF? On a DVD player or cable box, the coaxial digital output usually carries multiplexed stereo and/or surround digital audio, probably Dolby AC-3.

SPDIF is only two channel, so there would be no such thing as a simple SPDIF to 5.1 device.

When you say the surround input of your receiver is discrete 5.1, what kind of connection do you mean? If it's on six discrete connectors it's probably analog. I don't know of any digital format that would use six discrete connectors on a home stereo.

SPDIF is used for carrying digital surround information in either Dolby Digital or DTS formats. It requires that the audio be compressed. For uncompressed audio, SPDIF is a 2-channel format.

And yes, if the receiver has 6 audio inputs, they are going to be line-level analog audio inputs. The purpose of a surround decoder is not to break a single digital signal into multiple digital signals, but to convert a single digital signal into multiple analog signals. It's handling the D->A conversion.