[mikemoper]

• Kodi (20.2) on an Amazon Fire TV Stick Max 4k with a Samsung Q80B TV
  
• The ARC HDMI port of the Samsung is connected to a Panasonic BluRay player that supports up to Dolby Digital Pro (with 5.1 speakers)
  
• Kodi is set for 5.1 channels and Audio Passthrough is turned off
  

Setting the Fire TV Stick to "PCM" works but its not decoded by the BluRay player as 5.1 surround sound, it's down sampled to 2.1.

Setting the Fire TV Stick to "Dolby Digital" or "Dolby Digital Plus" causes the Panasonic BluRay player to correctly report "Dolby" as the input format and 5.1 is correctly played. But only for the first video played.

If I stop and restart the video or play any other video, then the audio will go silent for 2 or 3 seconds then return to normal for a couple seconds then go silent again. This audio stuttering happens with the Kodi UI sounds, Video and Music. The UI also becomes very sluggish.

The only way to correct it is to reboot everything or go back to the Fire TV Stick settings and change the audio from Dolby to PCM. Then the audio sounds fine but of course no Dolby Digital. Immediately switching it from PCM back to Dolby Digital causes the sound to work fine again, but only for one video playback.

I've tried powering off and on the Panasonic BluRay player when the Dolby is stuttering, but that does not solve the problem.

Suggestions?

[fritsch]

Try the following: in Kodi set speakers to 2.0, enable only AC3 and Dolby transcoding.

In FireTV settings set to Dolby surround, not to best available and not to digital plus.

I think there is a handshake issue with androids audiotrack and you BluRay device. Nothing Kodi could fix, but helping it by reducing the requirements.

[Sholander]

Try the following: in Kodi set speakers to 2.0, enable only AC3 and Dolby transcoding.

@mikemoper
In this case you must first set Audio Passthrough to ON, and for Audio output device choose Android IEC packer since Kodi IEC packer does not always work on Fire Stick 4K devices.

[mikemoper]

Thanks so much! That did the trick.

FWIW, I then used an Android App called called "AV Sync" that uses the phone's camera and microphone to help synchronize the delay setting for lip-sync. It worked really well on the Fire TV Stick.