Ive been trying to get this to work for hours and have had no success. All I want to do is run SPDIF in passthrough mode because the gay ass cmedia software down mixes everything into 2 channel and there is no option to change it. I would use my onboard but its not compatible with xp or its just f***ed from the word go.

soundcard
Aopen Cobra aw-870LP sound card with optical out

most SPDIF outputs will only output 5.1 if it's already encoded to Dolby Digtal, ie, a DVD. the vast majority cannot encode on the fly to dolby. so therefor, games, windows calibration, etc, will not come through in 5.1

there's simply not enough bandwidth to send it uncompressed, so it has to send either 2 channel uncompressed, or 5.1 dolby (compressed) and this requires an encoding step and licensing

bah so gay i was trying to watch back to the future in dts 96k ah well... wasted $80 on this s***.