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2006 Mac Pro and HD 4870 for home theater?

P-Worm

P-Worm

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Jul 16, 2002
2,045
1
Salt Lake City, UT
I also posted this in the Mac Pro forum, but maybe it fits here better:


2006 MacPro HD4870 for home theater?
My 2006 Mac Pro is starting to feel a bit old and I am thinking of getting a new computer in the future. With that, I am thinking of what to do with the old Mac Pro and have decided it would be great to use as a media center. My plan is to put a Blu-Ray drive in it, stock it with large capacity hard drives in some sort of software RAID configuration and rip my Blu-Rays to the drives using MakeMKV. I don't plan to compress the MKV and instead want to use the uncompressed Blu-Ray track.

It has an HD 4870 in there and I am trying to figure out if I can use an adapter on one of the mini display ports to output both video and audio to a receiver. I want to be able to use the uncompressed audio tracks that come on many blu-ray disks (7.1 surround) and so I believe the optical port on the Mac Pro is not sufficient. Is it possible to pass the 7.1 track over HDMI through the mini display port?

P-Worm
 
O

orestes1984

macrumors 65816
Jun 10, 2005
1,000
4
Australia
That model doesn't do audio over Display Port so you're out of luck for sound and video without a 2 step process. To get your audio out you will need to use a mini toslink to toslink cable for optical audio plugged into your headphone jack. Don't worry this is also an optical audio jack....

The process from there will be just fine outputting whatever audio tracks are in the MKV container to a receiver provided you have a receiver that can handle optical inputs and the types of sound encodings in the MKV container.

For video you'll need a Mini Display Port to HDMI adapter, this will plug straight into your TV and provide you with a digital picture signal and meet the HDMI DRMs.
 
Last edited:
P-Worm

P-Worm

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Jul 16, 2002
2,045
1
Salt Lake City, UT
Something like this? If I have a receiver that takes Toslink that can receive DTS-HD or Dolby TrueHD it will be able to pass the 7.1 audio track? I don't have a receiver picked out, so I can take that into consideration. Thanks!

P-Worm
 
O

orestes1984

macrumors 65816
Jun 10, 2005
1,000
4
Australia
P-Worm said:
Something like this? If I have a receiver that takes Toslink that can receive DTS-HD or Dolby TrueHD it will be able to pass the 7.1 audio track? I don't have a receiver picked out, so I can take that into consideration. Thanks!

P-Worm
Click to expand...

Yes, the Macs are capable of passing through whatever optical audio is in in the MKV container and that cable will do just fine for your audio.
 
D

DrNeroCF

macrumors 6502
Sep 2, 2004
276
0
I had a 4890 in a 2006 Mac Pro for awhile. There's a DVI to HDMI adapter that you can get from ATI that sends audio through the HDMI cable. That's only in windows, though. No clue if the Mac card can do the same thing.

I've been trying to figure out how to pipe surround sound through optical for years before that, the only program that can take 5.1 aac or anything and turn it into DTS and pipe it over optical in realtime is Plex.
 
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