#32 Conflict with Audio Card

[Alex]

I have an Asus Xonar DS Audio Card that works in two modes: Speakers and HD Output. The reason is that Windows only works with 2-channels audio through SPDIF, so any audio processing or even volume control is impossible with multichannel audio. What this audio card does is convert analog multichannel audio to DTS and outputs through SPDIF.

The problem: WinLirc is somehow conflicting with 'Speakers' mode, the one that has the analog multichannel conversion to DTS with SPDIF Output. WinLirc gets very unresponsive in this mode.

Switching to HD Output, WinLirc works perfectly but in this mode Windows only outputs 2.0 PCM audio to my receiver.

Is there any possible reason to why this is happening? These devices seem totally unrelated but there is a conflict.

I'm using serial infrared receiver and this problem happens with old and latest version of WinLirc.

[Ian]

I'm using serial infrared receiver

The timing for the serial receiver is done on the CPU. So if your CPU or system is doing other stuff, the sampling of the timing can be off enough that receiving no longer works. The solution is .. to either lower CPU usage, set winlirc to realtime priority, or get a receiver that does all the timing on a chip and sends that to the PC.

[Alex]

Can this happen even if I'm using a quad core i7 CPU? I also tried to set affinity of the programs to different cores but nothing changed. Anyway, I'll see if i can find a different receiver. Thank you for the explanation!