Audio Engine support?

[Tinwarble]

Licensing is not required to pass-through/bitstream audio.

You only need a license if you are hardware decoding the audio.

There are only 2 instances in which you need a license to pass-through, one is if you are going to hardware decode and two if you have one license but not the other. So if a device is licensed for DTS, but not for DTS-HD, then it can't be passed through.

However, we are not talking about hardware decoding......we are talking about passing the audio to another device that is licensed to decoded the audio stream.

For instance, the WDTV Play has no licensing for any audio, but can and does pass-through all audio streams (DD, DTS, DTS-HD, TrueHD). On the other hand, the WDTV Live HUB & SMP both are DTS licensed, but are not DTS-HD licensed so they can't pass-through DTS-HD without a license because it would conflict with the DTS license.

If licensing was needed, then the same would hold true for the RPi for DTS pass-through and it wouldn't be able to do that either.