I’ve just setup my new Xbox to my Samsung 7 series TV.
Xbox to Receiver via HDMI … receiver to TV via ARC. Firtly I relised that even though I had enabled 5.1 on Xbox’s settings I was still only getting PMC sound on the receiver. (Tested it with DTS track on a DVD and 5.1 DD movie using Plex).
I then changed the xbox’s setup from 5.1 Uncompressed to “Bitsteam” Dolby Digital… apparently it gives surround sound output but it converts everything to Dolby Digital, even DTS tracks, be it on Plex or even using the Blue Ray player … not ideal.
Microsoft hasn’t released any DTS decoder for the Xbox One/S apps so any app using the official video player will need to convert that audio for playback. In Plex’s case the audio is converted to DD by the server.
Uncompressed setting in the Xbox should be sending PCM audio in whatever setting you pick (IE Stereo, 5.1, 7.1).
Bitstream DTS/DD will output audio only in the format you specified and should be outputting the number of channels for your audio stream.
The two above settings Plex has no control of modifying, what you set is what you get. So if you set your audio for uncompressed 5.1 the Xbox will always output in 5.1 even if the source is stereo (The remaining channels will just be empty).
From what you are saying above, everything appears to be working the way it should unless the PCM you are seeing is only being seen as stereo and not 5.1, provided you are able to set it to 5.1 uncompressed then it would imply that a conversion is happening after the fact as like I said above the Xbox will stay in 5.1 mode even with stereo sources in that setting.
On my setup I have the Xbox One connected to my Samsung TV on HDMI 1 I then have my LG surround sound connected to HDMI 3 for ARC playback. Using the HDMI uncompressed settings I could not select anything above stereo without getting an error on the xbox. Because of this I set my options to bitstream out with DD as it has less overall conversions with the Plex App.
Thanks jmckee … Now correct me if I’m wrong. If my receiver shows PMC it will always be stereo, right? I mean, even if theres sound coming out of all speakers it will not be a discrete surround sound, only a duplication of the 2 stereo channels.
For it to be truly surround sound it will have to be either DD or DTS. Right?
With that said, it does sound like having it set to Bistream DD is the best case scenario.
PCM can be any number of channels. The main difference is that PCM is considered to be lossless uncompressed audio. However, currently everything must be decoded by the Xbox One and then converted to the output choice. So with PCM you should be able to still get full surround as the channels from the original audio should be still copied over to their respective parts. The only exception I currently know of is if you have a 7.1 setup but have the xbox setup for 5.1. In this case users report that the rear audio from the 5.1 comes out the rear speakers of the 7.1 setup instead of the side speakers. I do not have a 7.1 setup myself so I cannot confirm/test this, but that is what has been reported and I even saw a bug report on the Xbox forums about it as well.
So with that, the reason I say DD is currently the best choice (at least for me) is that all my media is either in AAC, AC3, or one of the HD audio formats. AAC and AC3 audio get sent directly to the Xbox by the server while the HD audio formats get transcoded to AC3 or AAC. The Xbox then decodes the audio and re-encodes and outputs the audio in the format selected from the audio menu. With my setup I know for a fact the DD works with my receiver no problem and the PCM via Arc will only allow me to select stereo from the xbox menu but I can select bitstream DD and my receiver ‘lights’ up with DD 5/1 (It’s old so I don’t actually have a DD light that stays on). From googling around I have seen reports on some TV’s that via Arc typically its PCM 2.0 or DD 5.1. I couldn’t find anything on the internet directly from Samsung for my TV, but I did try playing DD 5.1 test video that plays the channels independent of each other and was able to get sounds in the correct channels. I also was able to see this on the kinect setup for my Xbox One, but I don’t have the adapter to plug it into the Xbox One S to verify it that way.
(Sorry about the long winded post).
Long story short: I have read PCM is limited to 2.0 on Arc while DD should do 5.1 (And some people report no audio with DTS via Arc). And you should be able to test out the 5.1 with one of these demo videos: http://www.demo-world.eu/dolby-dts-thx-wmv-distributor-trailers-sd/
@jmckee said:
The only exception I currently know of is if you have a 7.1 setup but have the xbox setup for 5.1. In this case users report that the rear audio from the 5.1 comes out the rear speakers of the 7.1 setup instead of the side speakers. I do not have a 7.1 setup myself so I cannot confirm/test this, but that is what has been reported and I even saw a bug report on the Xbox forums about it as well
I can definitely confirm this the rears channels become side channels and the side become dead and to fix this issue have to change it in the xbox to output 5.1 uncompressed. But here the kicker I don’t get the 7.1 cause it’s in 5.1 uncompressed and man it drives me nuts that it does that.
