You have an older home theater receiver with an S/PDIF input (optical or RCA) and want to play movies with DTS or Dolby Digital soundtracks? This guide shows how you can get 5.1 sound output from a Raspberry Pi even if your AV receiver does not feature an DTS/AC3 capable HDMI input.
Step 1: What you need
- A home theater receiver or amplifier with an SPDIF input.
- A Raspberry Pi 2 including a power supply
- A HiFiBerry Digi+ add-on card
- optional: enclosure
Note that you can also use an older Raspberry Pi 1. The GUI performance is not as good as on the RPI2, but it might be ok for many people. However module configuration for the Raspberry Pi 1 is a bit different as the current version of OpenElec for the Raspberry Pi 1 does not support device tree overlays.
Step 2: Connect the hardware
First you need to put the HiFiBerry Digi board onto the Raspberry Pi. This is easy, no soldering is needed. Then connect the optical or electrical output to the SPDIF input of your home theater system.
Step 3: Download and install OpenElec
Download and install the latest version of OpenElec from the OpenElec web site. Note that there are different versions for the Raspberry Pi 1 and 2. You need to download the Raspberry Pi 2 version!
Step 4: Configure the HiFiBerry drivers
Firs you need to activate the drivers for the HiFiBerry Digi+ sound card.
Login to your OpenElec system using ssh
On first boot you should enable SSH, otherwise you can still do it later in the OpenElec settings. Find the IP address in
For more detail: Create a video player with Dolby Digital/DTS output