[wizziwig]

I am still curious on this PCM vs passthrough debate and why everyone thinks they "need" passthrough so their AVR blinky lights look good. From my reading there literally is no difference so why is everyone always passthrough paasthrough passthrough? Just curious what I don't know

There is metadata in the bitstreamed audio (Dialog Normalisation) etc. that allows receivers to do post processing (like loudness reduction etc.) that you can't do if you decode to PCM in Kodi, but in the main I agree with you.

While I have a receiver with HDMI, I'm sure there are still plenty of users with older receivers that are limited to optical/coax surround. If you eliminate passthrough, you're forcing them to PCM stereo or reducing their quality (and increasing CPU usage) but having to decode AC3/DTS to multi-channel PCM and then re-encode back to AC3. Dropping or repeating video frames or AC3/DTS audio frames as was done on the older versions seems preferable if it doesn't happen very frequently (as is the case on Haswell or never Intel hardware that have very accurate a/v clocks).