[mattlach]

I just found out how Dolby Digital in Live TV still (or again?) works:

set your audio configuration to 2.0 channels, activate passthrough and(!) "enable Dolby Digital (AC3) transcoding"

Now both, video files and Live TV 5.1 is working fine with my Fire TV (v1).
I checked with an ac3 test file and Live TV (Star Wars, e.g. the spaceships were clearly hearable coming from the back, flying to the front)

AC3 transcoding was enabled in my sample video above.

I wonder if the fact that the final release of Krypton prevents prevents passthrough when "Player -> Sync Playback to Display" is enabled has anything to do with it.

The reason for this is stated as Sync Playback to Display would require transcoding of audio, and we can't transcode passed through audio. But if we can transcode AC3 why do this?

So, here is what I suspect happened, but with more detail:

After I upgraded to Krypton, passthrough stopped working all together. It required me to disable "Player -> Sync Playback to Display" for passthrough to work. In Jarvis this wasn't a requirement. The reason why is listed in the config description:

(Yes, this is Krypton, I just switched the skin back to Confluence, as I didn't want to have to teach everyone in the house how to use the TV again, they already complain it is too complicated)



So the reason is that if this is enabled, resampling might be required, and the assumption is that kodi can't resample passed through audio.

But then under System -> Audio -> Audio Passthrough there's this:



It would seem as if AC3 transcoding would solve this sync problem. Is the fact that "Player -> Sync Playback to Display" is forced to be off in order to enable passthrough preventing the AC3 passthrough in the passthrough menu from working?

It seems like a mistake to disable passthrough if "sync playback to display" is enabled for this reason. Any thoughts?

The question is, how can I work around this for now?

What if, instead of using passthrough, I do all audio decoding in Kodi and present my receiver with multichannel PCM in 5.1?

If I have a 7.1 receiver (running with 5.1 speakers, two speakers are unpopulated for future upgrades) do I lose anything by going with this approach? I know it will probably increase CPU load on my Kodi box as it now has to do all the decoding, but it is a Haswell i5-4570T, so I think it can handle it no problem.

So, TLDR version, do I lose anything at all by moving to multichannel PCM with decode happening in Kodi instead of on my receiver? Will this fix my sync issue by allowing me to enable "sync playback to display"?