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spalmisano · 2016-10-29, 05:38

I have a Kodi installation on my Mac Mini environment that has been working perfectly. I installed rear Sonos speakers tonight in parallel with a Sonos Playbar.
On the DirecTV Genie receiver it sends the surround sound to the new rear speakers perfectly. On Kodi it sends audio to the Playbar but not the rear speakers. Ive seen lots of posts with suggestions but not yet seen what's needed to have surround sound sent on both the Kodi video and the DirecTV video.

What can I do to enable this?
Let me know if there's other detail needed to diagnose what's up.

.sal

**Memphiz** · 2016-10-29, 09:42

This is something that needs to be setup in the operating system. Osx has the audio midi setup utility. At the end kodi needs one single audio output device that has a proper 5.1 channel map set.

I would need to see a screenshot of your audio midi setup tool.

spalmisano · 2016-10-30, 04:44

I was able to get 5.1 on some movies in Kodi, but not all of them.

Here's my setup:
Two Sonos Play:1s and a Playbar for audio. The Sonos app is showing Dolby Digital 5.1 and Im happy with the audio when watching via DirecTV.

I also have Kodi hooked up to this same setup and Im having an issue with getting the surrounds to return audio.

If I tell Kodi the receiver is capable of DTS, I get no audio. This is as expected since the Playbar doesn't support DTS.
Once that's disabled I do get audio but not always from the surrounds.

If the movie is encoded with just AC3/Dolby Digital, I get all five zones.
If the movie is only DTS, there's still audio from the Playbar, but nothing from the surrounds. Is this because Sonos (or Kodi) is down-mixing the audio to 2.0/stereo? In every circumstance the Sonos app shows DD 5.1 for about my system.

What am I missing?

spalmisano · (This post was last modified: 2016-10-30, 05:27 by spalmisano.)

And here is the midi configuration

**Memphiz** · 2016-10-30, 10:29

There is Not Even a sonos visible to kodi - seems the Playbar is doing that 5.1 distribution - there is no way for kodi to fix this - because the playbar only announces as 2.0 system - ac3 only works because the playbar decodes it. If the whole sonos system including the rears would be visible to osx kodi could transcode dts to ac3- but Not how it is now.

You should have bought a normal amp instead. Sonos is really nice for music though.