ASUS Sound Card Outputs HD Audio Codecs over HDMI - CeBIT 2008 Day 2

ASUS Sound Card Outputs HD Audio Codecs over HDMI

Here's an interesting product from ASUS, it's a HDMI-equipped sound card:

The sound card accepts a HDMI input from your graphics card, then outputs video combined with audio over a second HDMI port. The benefit of this approach is that you can enable passthrough of high definition codecs such as Dolby TrueHD, although it is a somewhat clumsy way of doing it. We would much prefer for the GPU to properly handle it in the first place but we'll have to wait for a while for that to happen.

ASUS will release the Xonar HDAV in late Q2 of this year.

Continuing on its HDMI kick, ASUS also demonstrated a PCIe x1 card that could accept a DVI input and output it as HDMI:

ASUS does some video processing and upscaling on the signal for 1080p output over HDMI.

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