Good day,
I need your help.
I want to upgrade my home theater to UHD. My TV already supports this. However, my HTPC is too weak for this. My Onkyo AV receiver is a bit older and can’t do 4K passthrough.
This means:
either I get me a Nvidia Shield 2019 PRO, which is connected (HDMI) directly to TV. From there, the sound should go via S/PDIF to my receiver. Since I unfortunately can not connect directly to the AV receiver. I hope the TV then passes the sound. And what happens if the TV does not know the sound ATMOS or the AV receiver can not play DTS-HD, for example?
I get myself a current OLED TV (LG) with WebOS6. Then I would not need a Shield and the sound goes from the TV directly to the AV receiver. But don’t know if Plex runs well with UHD under WebOS6. Since many movies have DTS and that is probably not supported by the TV.
Does anyone have experience and can possibly give me a tip?
Regarding option 2. Correct LG does not support DTS.
My setup is as follows.
Apple TV 4k connected to LG TV. Another HDMI connected from TV to Onkyo Receiver. Change sound settings in TV to ARC. Onkyo is set to the appropriate HDMI port.
Best Solution: Nvidia Shield Pro ← HDMI → Receiver/Soundbar ← HDMI → TV
The Shield and Xbox One are the only devices that support 4K HDR and TrueHD/dts-HD audio passthrough.
Current LG TVs do not support dts or TrueHD passthrough from TV based apps. When using the LG Plex app, both will be transcoded to a supported format. Furthermore, the LG Plex app has very limited subtitle support, generally resulting in video transcoding when subtitles are in use. See this post for additional details.
Note: Samsung TVs have the same audio passthrough restrictions as LG for TV based apps. Sony Android TVs support passthrough for dts, but not dts-HD, audio. No known TV supports TrueHD passthrough.
Current LG TVs block dts passthrough from HDMI attached devices (Shield, Roku, Blu-ray player, etc). Other TVs may block audio passthrough as well. If you need this capability, check the reviews at rtings.com prior to any purchase. They test audio passthrough from external devices.
HDMI-ARC and optical audio impose further restrictions. Neither supports lossless audio such as TrueHD or dts-HD. HDMI-ARC supports Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital Plus, and dts up to 5.1 channels. PCM is limited to 2.0 channels. Optical audio is further limited in that it does not support Dolby Digital Plus.
Thank you very much for your answers! They helped me and showed me that it’s not that simple.
Since the Shield does not have separate outputs and the TV does not support DTS, the HDMI from the TV to the AV receiver will probably not work if I have a movie in Plex that only has a DTS track.
I have seen that the new Philips OLEDs from 2020/2021 support DTS and also HDMI (eARC). They run Android 9/10, which would be another alternative. But first I will now still look for a solution where I can keep my current TV.
I don’t think this is true. My Sony X900H seems to passthrough everything just fine through eARC. I have yet to see it have an issue with any audio format. Maybe I’m missing something though. Really the only place I have run into trouble with the TV is with super high bitrate 4K content. Otherwise it can play basically everything flawlessly and passthrough all the audio I have thrown at it. I still use an Nvidia Shield Pro (2019), but I have never seen my TV have trouble passing through audio.
@Blkbyrd what he meant, was no known TV’s pass through truehd via their internal plex app.
using an external HDMI device, like the shield (or bluray player/xbox/ps/etc), is the only way to pass through truehd/dtshdma through a tv (with EARC).
That’s what I’m saying though. My Sony X900H seems to passthrough basically every audio codec through eARC to my receiver via the internal app just fine. The only thing it seems to fiddle with first is AAC, but I think that is actually happening at the receiver and being changed to PCM. Again I may not be looking for the right thing, but I have never seen the TV try to transcode an audio stream, and the receiver seems to see those audio outputs in their appropriate codec.
Including TrueHD? If so, that’s great. Have not heard of any TV that does that.
Regarding dts-HD MA, I thought the TV only passed the lossy dts core, not the lossless “-HD MA” portion. I’m relying on my memory of prior posts, so could absolutely be wrong on this.
it sounds like the tv is decoding the aac to pcm, and that is what the receiver is getting.
you will need to double check on the truehd and dtshdma, because as fordguy mentioned, there are no known tv’s which will pass any HD audio (truehd/dts-ma-hd) via the smart tv plex app.
the way to confirm is via the plex dashboard (video/audio are both direct play truehd/dtshdma) and your receiver shows truehd/atmos and dts-hd-ma as audio codec inputs.
compare what your shield shows while playing, versus playing plex via the tv plex app.
When I get off of work I’ll give it a go. I’m not sure my reciever displays what codec it is being fed, but I’ll see if I can pull it out of somewhere on it. It is a Sony STR-DN1080.
@FordGuy61@TeknoJunky it seems as though it was a little column A and a little column B. TrueHD did indeed transcode, but the TV had no problem passing a 2Mbps 5.1 DTS-HD MA track. Confirmed through dashboard and Plex Dash.
