Surround Sound S/PDIF Issues

[Tripfist]

Hey guys,

 

I'm trying to get 5.1/7.1 surround sound setup through my receiver/laptop. I have my laptop set to S/PDIF output and have the proper cabling being sent to my receiver. I test the sound out in Vista 64 Ultimate, comes out fine through all my speakers. When I start GTA4, the only selections I get are headphones and speakers. The speaker output is only stereo. I thought that this game supported surround sound but I'm not sure why the options are not present. Surround sound works fine in other games. Anyone have any tips or tricks to get around this issue?

 

Specs:

Vista 64 Ultimate

Sager 5793 laptop/8800GTX 512mb/Realtek HD Audio

HT Equipment:

Pioneer 1018AH

[Tripfist]

Can anyone help with this?

[3FaST]

You sure you have 5.1 as output or something (in Windows?)? Did you patch the game?

 

I think I had same options except I didn't need them, but recently I found I have Surround option in audio (could be that 1st patch added it), and now I can always select it. One difference though, I don't use SPDIF.

[KMO1000]

S/PDIF only supports surround sound if it's encoded through Dolby Digital or DTS. GTA won't do that for you - you need a sound card that can compress multichannel sound using either Dolby Digital Live or DTS Connect.

 

I've had it work with 5.1 analogue outputs - the GTA surround option becomes available if the system has multichannel output enabled.

 

Not sure what your other games are doing - are they just doing Dolby Pro Logic encoding onto the stereo output?

 

And why on earth does GTA IV have a "Dolby Digital" logo on the box, given all the above?