Can we please get the new audio passthrough functionality that Apple announced at WDC in July now that tvOS 26 is out?
This would be a huge improvement for audio on AppleTv.
Here’s the docs for reference: AVAudioContentSource.passthrough | Apple Developer Documentation
It seems unlikely:
It is not yet supported by Apple TV OS 26
What do you think it’s supposed to do? Your link is just an enumeration flag, how do you think it’s going to improve audio?
In theory according to the Apple presentation which said that they would work with media apps on a case by case basis to enable, it should allow bitstream pass through of audio untouched to amplifiers that are certified.
As a result, the audio on an AppleTV would then not need to be transcoded if not already Atmos or Dolby 5.1 (Or obviously AAC) meaning that all other standards would directly be sent to the amplifier that knows how to decode all of these and holds the licenses directly so the quality will be better in those cases at the very least while also eliminating transcoding that doesn’t need to happen.
(it only helps people with an Amplifier that can decode directly, but it’s significant as we see with the Nvidia Shield)
Got a reference to this hypothetical apple presentation? I have never seen apple push bitstreaming of encoded audio out of the appletv. Your post reads like AI hallucination.
You linked an enumeration flag for api that is within app, internal handling of audio. There is no way for it to result in the output of encoded audio formats. AppleTV outputs only lossless LPCM audio AFAIK. Amplifiers can work with this LPCM natively. Old and new, “certified” whatever that means, or not.
Thats nebulous. Where… where is it shown support for outputting of encoded bit-streamed audio? I think you may be hallucinating.
The rest of your post reads loopy and doesn’t make sense, there are clear words but they don’t string together logically. Try again?
There is not transcoding on amplifiers, you only want your avr processing room corrections onto the lpcm stream. Lpcm is the goal and the appletv today is built around delivering it. On top of it being ideal for amplifier, it’s also the least expensive(processing wise) for apple to apply their audio adjustments and merger with their voice assistant. Everything apple needs can be done upstream, everything we want the avr to do downstream can be done.
Not my job to do the dev work for a company that I pay for their service to provide basic functionality. Sorry, just not my job. I’ve provided the path. This should be well documented by the Plex team and they should know what’s going on with direct contacts inside Apple given the stature of the Plex product.
The rest of your statement just indicates you don’t have a clue what you’re talking about and have no idea how digital amplifies work.
AppleTV cannot transcode DTS/DTS Master and other standards to LPCM because they require licenses from DTS etc. to do so. As a result Apple Products cannot pass on those standards to the amplifier with a single conversion to a lossless representation. As a result, Plex transcodes these into open source or free licensed codecs (Dolby 5.1 because it’s part of the digital TV standard they gave up their licensing rights) to the amplifier because Plex ALSO doesn’t have a DTS license. 3rd party Plex clients DO and transcode it on AppleTV natively and thus this doesn’t really benefit because then the app has done the work and is outputting (LP)PCM from the App directly through the HDMI to the receiver. It’s AS IF Apple or Plex had the licenses because the app has it and does the work.
Thus the amplifier is getting from the AppleTV in all of these cases, a degraded, double transcoded version if using the plex native client.
FURTHER since you don’t have a clue how digital amplifiers work: PCM and now LPPCM (which is just run length compressed PCM just like RLE Bitmaps for images which is then converted lossless to PCM in the amplifier) ALL digital audio ultimately is converted to PCM whenever the signal gets converted from Digital to an analog waveform. It MUST do this because it’s literally how the BJT or more recently Mosfet is switched on and off to create the wave form. It is the direct representation of the electrical signal that is fed into the audio amp’s control chip (or a micro controller if you want to do it yourself) that is used to switch the gate. In the case of a BJT this is a voltage and amperage controlled linear signal (because all amperage is ultimately voltage delta). In the case of a mosfet is the PWM signal that represents the same on average smoothed by capacitors to result in the same wave form. This conversion to raw PCM is TRANSCODING. It MIGHT be lossless because it’s from LPPCM which is lossless byte deduplication, but it is still TRANSCODING. And you want to do as few lossy transcodes as possible which right now in the case of all not Dolby 5.1, AAC, Flac, MP3 and Atmos, Plex is causing 2 lossy transcodes instead of only the one (because the codecs are all lossy by definition and compress using similar techniques to AV1, H265, H264 etc. and in fact almost always we get new audio codecs along with the new video codecs because they use the same new techniques in the FFTs to get just as good of quality while increasing compression. We also typically get single image codecs from the same too)
FURTHER All analog audio is transcoded from the mics that produce PCM or an analog wave by using an amplifier in reverse (for digital PCM from analog waveform), INTO the codec that it is in the video or audio file. So when I say 2 lossy transcodes, the first is when the original raw uncompressed audio is first digitized and encoded. Dolby and DTS especially have created entire systems that try and take the raw electrical analog signal and drive directly as possible into their codecs in licensed equipment, but the fact still remains, it’s a lossy process so most of the time the audio is just captured in 96/144 or higher (LP)PCM by the producers for editing, and then transcoded from there into Atmos, DTS, etc. etc.
AND if you don’t know this and you’re working on digital audio at this level, you have a fundamental problem because you can’t code what you don’t understand.
You have an answer to?:
>where is it shown support for outputting of encoded bit-streamed audio? I think you may be hallucinating.
