This guide is intended for folks who do not bitstream to DTS-HD MA-capable decoder and who prefer MPC-HC/Potplayer/KMPlayer etc. over commercial solutions like Arcsoft TMT5 or PowerDVD 11 for various reasons, like for instance much better handling of MKV files and high-resolution PGS subtitles.
Software needed:
LAV audio filters (please use the latest versions since earlier versions have shown various issues with DTS-HD MA playback)
Arcsoft DTS decoder v1.1.0.8 (you may also use earlier versions, but so far I have not had any problems with this one).
Procedure:
1) Install LAV audio filters x86. (The package also contains LAV splitting and video decoding filters, which are in general not needed for our purposes here.)
2) Navigate to C: |Program Files (x86)| LAV Filters | x86 and put dtsdecoderdll.dll in that folder.
3) Open your software player of choice and add the LAV audio decoder to the preferred filters for audio decoding. From the same place, you should be able to open the configuration window of LAV audio decoder. Under Formats select DTS (it is named as dca) as well as any other formats you would like to be decoded via LAV.
Remark: TrueHD decoding via LAV audio filter does not work with MPC-HC internal splitter/Gabest! If you want to decode TrueHD via LAV audio filters, you will have to use LAV splitter or some other splitter like Haali etc, depending on the file formats. In my experience, other splitters like LAV splitter may cause subtitle delays. If you want to keep MPC-HC internal splitter, you can use ffdshow for full TrueHD decoding instead.
4) Disable DTS decoding by any other filters, including player-internal filters.
You are done.
Verification:
Find some movie with DTS-HD MA 7.1 channels and start playing it. Right-click on the player screen, choose filters and then LAV audio. Open the status tab. Under input you should see DTS-HD MA 7.1, and under output you should see PCM 7.1. If the channel mixer shows all 8 channels being active, then the player is clearly decoding the full DTS-HD MA audio, because the lossy DTS core has only 5.1 channels.
You can download a sample with DTS-HD MA 7.1 audio from here.
