surround sound card

[Steve]

I have 2 options for surround sound on my PC. i have an on-board motherboard sound card with AC97 drivers, supporting 5:1 (????) This is not the most preferable option, as it would leave wires hanging out of the front audio ports.

I also have a 5:1 sound card (takes up 2 expansion slots, unbranded), which also supports surround sound. I would like to use this.

What i'd like to know is how does the 5:1 signal get from the DVD to the sound card? Does it just use the codec in media player? I suppose what I mean is does the hardware (mobo, pc dvd drive) support true dolby 5:1, when i have the relevant software?

Also, the sound card has 3 output plugs. "front" (green) "rear" (black) and "c/sub" (orange).

Does this match the config on most off-the-shelf 5:1 speakers? Or will it need any adaptors? I have a 19 inch monitor and would like to watch DVDs on it, in glorious surround sound . Anyone done this before? Advice welcome

 

[baldy01]

The Dolby Digital sound is just a data stream. Its fed via the PCI bus to the sound card which decodes it into discrete channels, if you use the speaker jacks, or if it has a digital SPDIF out whihc some cards do the decoding can be done externaly by a surround sound processor. If you have 5.1 discrete channels out then the decoding will be done in hardware on the sound card.
I'm not sure that Media Player supportd DVD playback and not all DVD playback software supports DD, so you need something like PowerDVD.

My Soundblaster speakers have jack plugs colour coded the same as the sockets, so yes they should match.

Pete