Quote Originally Posted by lloydsmart View Post
Yes, I'm aware of the limitations of linux wrt bluray at the moment, but you can playback bluray rips, and there is also the option to use the live streaming function of a ripping program called MakeMKV to play blurays without even ripping them first.

The reason I'd use a sound card is to get bitstreaming of the new lossless formats (Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD MA) to my amp via HDMI 1.3. (The amp is an Onkyo 705).

However, I won't be able to do the bitstreaming in linux for a while as there's no software support for it yet, but there is work being done in this area as newer builds of FFDSHOW on windows support bitstreaming thorugh the ASUS XONAR HDAV 1.3, so imo it's only a matter of time until this functionality finds its way into ffmpeg, and therefore to XBMC on linux. Until then, I might use XBMC on Windows. I'd get hardware acceleration and lossless bitstreaming by using the DSPlayer build with the newer FFDSHOW.
Well you do seem to know what you're doing .

It sounds like you're setting yourself up to do a lot of work to avoid running Windows though, including limiting yourself feature-wise. Any particular reason you are this against running Windows on the HTPC? I would think that anyone who is going to such lengths to get a lossless audio setup would see the benefit of just playing blu-ray content without having to convert it with loss (minimal loss, but arguably the loss is the same or more than audio loss vs truehd with a reasonable file size) or stream 1080p + HD audio from a blu-ray over a network connection, which also requires a second PC running Windows anyway. It's not that it can't all be engineered around, but it seems like a lot more work to still arrive a bit short of the mark.