[onizuka]

Random Question:

While playing around with Koying's latest version of SPMC, I decided to see what would happen if I enabled RAW Passthrough on my Nvidia Shield TV sans AVR, Soundbar, Sound System, etc.. To my surprise (or ignorance) my 2015 Samsung JS8500 happily decoded the DTS, DD, etc, and played the file with sound!

I've never tried this before on any of my Kodi implementations (NUC with Win 10, Chromebox with OE, etc.) as I always assumed that the you would only use Passthrough for something that could actually "benefit" from the decoding (i.e. nice speaker setup).

Is there any good reason to have my TV do the decoding? The downside (for me at least) was losing volume control via the Shield. But is there any real upside? Saving some CPU cycles?

Thanks!

[noggin]

DD decode in TVs is quite common - particularly as it is used for a number of terrestrial and satellite broadcast platforms in the US and Europe that TVs will have tuners (and thus decoders) for. DTS is more of a surprise though, as it's not widely used OTA or for streaming services. (In fact I think it was only used as a test service on satellite in Europe and never deployed in anger)

[Moodyone]

My Samsung does the same, various licences must be included. It's not just audio that works surprisingly well. Some 20/25 year old 4:3 interlaced videos of Prime Suspect I have, don't play too well on my Shield. From within Kodi I can select my Samsung 4K TV as an external player and the TV handles them perfectly.

The upscaling of the Samsung is superb too, MP4 SD rips of TV shows look almost as good as 720p, when compared to my Shield's upscaling. Most surprising of all is the quality of 1080p material upscaled to 4K on the TV, it really is a step up.

[Nailig]

A TV is designed to handle different formats. There is dedicated hardware for that, tuned to the display. This last step is important.

I found the same with a did player which could upscale video to 1080p. But when I let the TV handle it, the picture quality was much better.