How to use Realtek Digital Coax Input

Dude, my head is bloody already over SPDIF on realtek.

Two things possibly at work here:
The digital input is looking for a digital 2 channel audio source. It's possible that the sound in on these things accepts ONLY 2 channel PCM audio, and not any bitstreamed audio such as DD 5.1 or DTS. Just because the input jack is the same as a 5.1 receiver and also the card claiming it supports 5.1 doesn't mean necessarily that the digital input will accept a 5.1 bitstream.

Second, the cable box might have an option in the audio settings letting you change the output from PCM to bitstream. Try switching and see what happens.

I'm not sure if it works for what you are doing, but there is a prog called AC3 filter that does AC3 (dolby digital 5.1) decoding on the fly, you can give that a try.

Well Here's what I've figured out - I downloaded a simple and easy recording program & discovered that i can only use the digital input jack for recording sound, but not for a traditional audio input. I was wondering if there was a way, perhaps a program, that could pass the sound through the input to my speakers live without recording and playing it back...

- Bob

In the volume control (speaker icon in sys tray) if you open this up, and go to Recording, then un-mute or raise the levels. You are looking for Wave Out mix or something like that (sorry I'm on XP here and not sure what the other options would look like in Vista/7)

I've used the input for pass through on other realtek chips, I doubt they got rid of the feature.