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I've spent hours trying and failing to get passthrough audio to work with Kodi 18 beta on my Xbox One X; I simply couldn't get this audio option to even display, whereas it both displayed and was a cinch to set with Kodi 17 on my NVIDIA Shield.
I then came to this forum and read the "read before you post" FAQ and learned "Can't be implemented. Passthrough audio not working - Not supported by Microsoft for 3rd party apps".
Not happy ,as one of the reasons I purchased an Xbox rather than a PS was the ease of installing Kodi and its XBMC roots.
Before I go and buy another streamer to run Kodi and forget the idea of using the Xbox, is there any news on this limitation remaining valid, please?
Many thanks.
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Thank you for such a fast reply, jcwillia1 - even if it is what I feared and confirms that I am not alone.
What a bummer this is. A bad purchase indeed and I feel duped - especially as Kodi on the expensive powerhouse of an Xbox One X is also more sluggish loading and skipping around in movies from my NAS than the near-instantaneous Shield. Both are wired on a gigabit network.
Not only do I now need to buy another streamer (I'll stick with another Shield as it runs rings round the cheap Android boxes I first tried) but I am one HDMI port short of what I need; my family likes things simple so I don't want extra switches or piggybacking of devices.
Time to sleep on it.
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The Xbox should be able to do surround sound audio IF you have the HDMI output set to bitstream, AND whatever video you're watching has 5.1/7.1 audio AND you've set the speaker configuration to 5.1/7.1 in the Kodi system settings. Sure, it might be decoded by the Xbox and sent as PCM, but for probably 99% of content, it should be essentially indistinguishable. What it won't do is send stereo audio over HDMI in a way that can be upmixed by an AVR. You get DD/DTS/Atmos with silence on any channel not being used. You can use Kodi to upmix stereo signals, but that won't help you if you also want to use Netflix or Prime Video. There's also currently a bug that seems specific to the Xbox One X regarding Kodi and the latest dashboard update where after you start Kodi for the second time, all of the text disappears. Hopefully Kodi devs can find a fix for that without relying on Microsoft, but who knows.
I forget where it was I saw it, but the person who is in charge of the audio subsystem of the Xbox One did seem interested in at least talking to some of the Kodi devs about this whole issue. It should go without saying that nothing may come of this, and even if it does, it might be a long time before we see it implemented, but it's reason for some (very) cautious optimism. There's just a couple minor issues with the audio on the Xbox platform that make it from being sort of the ultimate HTPC like the OG Xbox was when XBMC got started. Hopefully enough people in the Microsoft management figure it's worth trying to position the Xbox One as a media playback device that can also play games since they've pretty clearly lost this round to Sony. Might just give them a boost in sales if they can offer up a HTPC that needs minimal fuss to set up and is more than powerful enough to handle basically any format you throw at it likely for years to come.
For now, if you still have your Shield, I'd probably just fall back to that. The color space issues are the biggest reported issue, and honestly it really only affects the UI. Once you start playing a video, everything looks just fine. I did quite a bit of eyeballing the same scenes of a single video and I could not tell a difference between BT.709 and BT.2020 in the video. Things like the Netflix logo will look kind of washed out, but seems like a small price to pay if you don't want to have to keep changing output modes every time you want to watch HDR content. Especially, once again, since the actual content of videos is basically identical if the source is SDR.
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Buy a shield for local stream media
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Under no circumstances and no settings will Any xbox stream higher than 5.1 --- prove me wrong because I Have Spent Hours and hours trying
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Do me a favor - get an actual 7.1 test file from the internet - you may think you are getting sound out of 7 speakers but that doesn't mean you are getting 7.1
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Xbox is a great gaming device and could be a great streaming box but under Phil spencer Xbox is only and all about games.