[terrancej30144]

Hello,

I am new to KODI - XBMC etc. I recently bought an Amazon Fire TV and downloaded XBMC 13.4 Gotham. I use HDMI to connect to an Onkyo AVR which connects to a projector.

Initially, when the input audio source was AC3 5.1 or AAC - it was converted to Dolby and my AVR was playing correctly. For the DTS sound source, no issues as well. I was able to stream music from my Samsung device through XBMC localhost through the AFTV and it was playing the music as Dolby 5.1 through my Onkyo Receiver with great sound quality.

I had some video issues recently and was advised to upgrade from XBMC 13.4 to Kodi 14.2 which I did. It took care of the Video issues but introduced an Audio Conversion issue, If the input audio source is AC3 or DTS, it works fine. But the AAC audio sources are not getting converted to Dolby and just played as 2 channel stereo. I tried all the settings like Enabling Pass through, Enable Dolby Digital Transcoding, DTS capable receiver . tried all permutations and combinations. Nothing works.

What am I missing? Anyone had similar issue and fixed it? Please help.

[ozblogger]

Try these steps:

http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=...ranscoding

[terrancej30144]

Thanks for your reply, I tried those settings before as well and it did not work.

[jmedemar]

As far as I know, this has never worked on the fire tv. Not sure if its all android devices or just the fire tv specifically. There were other reports of it when the fire tv came out, but the only responses I've seen were to set the settings like listed above.

[technisol]

Ozblogger, thanks for the post to that thread. I never noticed before because most of the sources I have are either AAC 2.0 or AC3 5.1... I tried to play a AAC 5.1 movie last night and no sound! As suggested in the thread, I needed to set Number of Channels to 2.0, not 5.1, and then could select Enable Dolby Digital Transcoding under Passthrough! Power cycled the box to reset the audio and VOILA!

This was on a CX-S806 S802 powered android box.

THANKS!

I'm beginning to wonder if someone has put together a list of program sources or test files that lets you check a KODI setup and see if you have everything working for the most common formats. Until last night I thought I pretty much had all the bases covered.

[terrancej30144]

Thanks for your post. Unfortunately it does not work the same way on Amazon Fire TV. Are you saying it converted AAC 2.0 to Dolby 5.1? This is how it was working for me and now it stopped.

[technisol]

Nope, I wrote, "I tried to play an AAC 5.1 movie last night and no sound! As suggested in the thread, I needed to set Number of Channels to 2.0, not 5.1, and then could select Enable Dolby Digital Transcoding under Passthrough! Power cycled the box to reset the audio(as I had none after trying to play the movie) and VOILA!"

I was trying to play a movie with an AAC 5.1 soundtrack and got no sound. Switched to 2.0 channels in audio settings and selected Enable Dolby Digital Transcoding, as instructed in the helpful thread that was posted -the whole 2.0 channels instead of 5.1 threw me for a sec, but I tried it, power cycled and got sound when I attempted to again play the movie. I would assume(uh, oh watch that one) that since part of the changes was to select Enable Dolby Digital Transcoding that it might be doing so...

Honestly, I have an old el cheapo 5.1 channel speaker system bought years ago that happens to work great, but I don't think there is a single indicator on the AMP/Subwoofer assembly to indicate the type of audio being processed... However, as stated above, "no sound" to "SOUND" and following simple logic based on the nomenclature applied to the radio buttons selected I'd (lookout, here it comes) assume that it was, drum roll please, enabled to transcode Dolby Digital... Sounded pretty damned good too.

YMMV, and results do seem to vary from hardware to hardware with KODI, so who knows?

Perhaps you need to try Isengard, I never could get any version of Helix to run on my machine and I understand a lot of changes have been made. Matter of fact, with the versions of Gotham that I did have running I didn't even need to select Passthrough to get my setup working -it just did it. I think it would be worth trying the most up to date BETA if not the nightlies.

[jjd-uk]

Thanks for your post. Unfortunately it does not work the same way on Amazon Fire TV. Are you saying it converted AAC 2.0 to Dolby 5.1? This is how it was working for me and now it stopped.

Enabling Dolby Digital Transcoding will keep the channel count of the original audio stream, so if original audio is AAC 2.0 then DD 2.0 will be output, and if original audio is AAC 5.1 then DD 5.1 will be output. If what you want is to turn AAC 2.0 into DD 5.1 then you need to enable the Stereo Upmix option as well as the Enable Dolby Digital Transcoding option, note that this 5.1 is a crude upmix by copying front left to rear left, front right to rear right, and using an average of front left & right for centre.

[terrancej30144]

Thanks for your reply. Again as i mentioned, I tried all combinations - Stereo Upmix, 2.0, 5.1 everything. It seem to have no effect on the outcome. The only thing I did not try is recycling the AFTV after changing the setting. Let me try to see if I have any luck. Thanks

[technisol]

Power cycling could be the answer. "Fortunately", my experience has been that whenever I run into something that gives me a loss of audio I've had to do a power down reset to regain ANY audio. I'd guess that may be unique to the hardware or the way in which KODI does its thing, but either way I can't get ANY audio out of the box even after exiting KODI, once it's gone kaput, until after a power cycle.

[terrancej30144]

Hi, POWER CYCLING WORKED.

I am running Kodi 14.2 and I was fiddling around with the settings (except for power cycling). Now my setup is:

Number of Channels: 5.1
Stereo Upmix - Yes
Enable Passthrough - Yes
AC3 Receiver = Yes
Transcoding = Yes
DTS = Yes

I restarted the Amazon fire tv and it started working. I have seen lot of forums saying set the number of channels to 2.0 - i have no idea how or why it works now. I will leave it the way it is. Thanks for all your support.

[technisol]

Glad the power cycling helped. I got "lucky" and had to in order to get any audio.

If I recall correctly I had to set it to 2.0 channels in order to see some of the options? Maybe you can set it back to 5.1 after? I seem to recall someone explaining 2.0 had to do with the number of physical channels unless you were hooked up analog then use the speakers number -but that could have come from the drop down help when selecting the various options.

I hate to task others, but this is one of those areas where a really comprehensive setup guide written by someone who intimately understands the KODI settings for audio and various audio hookups would come in really handy. Provided, of course, there is enough similarity between platforms for it to help. It'd be great just to have each setup option full out explained and how it was envisioned they should interact. If such already exists and I've missed it, apologies and please point us all at it.

[guymyer]

I'm having the same issue on 15.2 with my nexus player. Unfortunately I can't really get it to work properly with a reboot.

[wrxtasy]

@terrancej30144 > you are going to confuse people now, read again what jjd-uk posted about 5.1 Stereo Upmixing. 5.1 Stereo upmixing will not give you the best results, follow the link ozblogger gave and reboot the device.

Simply put, when Dolby Digital Transcoding is selected the 5.1 AAC audio is digitally compressed (similar to video compression) and fed down the 2.0 pipe (HDMI or SPDIF) to an AVR to then be uncompressed back into digital 5.1 Audio.