[1.5.2] No surround sound on optical

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1

I just migrated from PleXBMC (Helix) to OpenPHT and everything is working perfect, except the fact that all of a sudden, I can’t get the surround sound to work.

The problem only arises when it is NOT passing through the audio. If passed through, everything works fine. If not passed through, it seems to convert the audio wrongly somehow. The receiver does show that it is receiving Dolby Digital (like it should), however the audio seems to be stereo. Is this a problem with OpenPHT?

It happens with all formats that contains surround sound that must be converted. For example, I play a DTS movie, and if I check the box that my reciever can handle DTS, it passes through and I get surround sound. But my receiver is too slow to handle DTS (I get delay) so I uncheck the box but leave AC3 checked (this worked on XBMC Helix) and then the DTS track gets converted to AC3 but the sound is now stereo.

Any thoughts? A peculiar thing I noticed is that when I have selected “Optical/Coax” the “my reciever supports multichannel LPCM” box gets greyed out and unselected. Don’t know why, but maybe it has something to do with it?

2

Ok, I have found the problem. It seems to be a bug or oversight in OpenPHT, and thankfully it can be worked around in the meantime.

The problem: My audio goes through an optical cable. This makes LPCM audio limited to 2 channels. I select “Optical/Coax” in OpenPHT expecting it to realize this, and transcode multi channel audio to AC3 to send to the receiver. But something here goes wrong.

As I said earlier, the checkbox “my reciever supports multichannel LPCM” is greyed out, presumably because it simply isn’t possible with an optical cable. And therein lies the problem it seems. Because if I switch to the “HDMI” setting (despite not using one) that checkbox is no longer grey, and then everything works if I uncheck it.

It’s as if it takes that checkbox into consideration under “HDMI” settings but not under “Optical/Coax”.

Hence, I have to select HDMI now to get OpenPHT to understand to convert the audio to AC3. This works but should probably be fixed.