[bjorsa]

Just bought an ODROID N2+ and am now suffering through yet another week of humiliating tech fails. The ODROID came with Ubuntu but I pulled the eMMC out to run CoreELEC from microSD (never got dual boot to work: it always resorts back to Linux). Took me hours just to get to that half-failing point. Now I can't get sound to work. Obviously, I'm NOT good at this.

*The new projector wants 4K HDR10. It's connected via a 10m long active 2.0b HDMI cable.
*I have an old but good 5.1 sound system. The legacy receiver lacks HDMI.
*To solve this, I tried a HDMI switch with Audio Extraction. Claims 4K 60hz HDMI 2.0b:
https://www.amazon.com/Extractor-Toslink...B07ZZ5G3ZP
Doesn't say how long the HDMI out cable can run. I figured my cable is active so whatever?
*The extractor worked fine running CoreELEC and 1080p streaming from svt.play; although that source only gives me stereo sound so who knows. As soon as I tried a movie stored on the local HDD I got only sound. Neither 1080 nor 4K material produced any picture, just a black screen. Weird, right? I'm utterly unable to even begin solving this.
*I read some folks managed to use different windows compatible USB soundcard/surround processor/dac boxes. They also should provide better sound quality, so I googled various USB Soundblasters, Asus Xonar, Topping products etc. Even this el-cheapo one looked ok (or will it wreck the sound after all?):
https://www.proshop.se/Ljudkort/StarTech...io/2292828
Also read some CoreELEC single board computers have problems with sound from USB. Seems there's a potential phletora of annoying issues with timing and shit like that.

I just want decent 5.1 sound. For now, I can live without Atmos etc, but I need my DTS-HD files to just work, even if I only get the basic compressed not-HD sound version. Optical SPDIF (with compressed 5.1) can be connected to the AVR, but any solution with separate RCA for front, back, center is preferable for my setup which involves more amplifiers. As I'm still studying I have little money to throw at this and on top of that I feel the planet doesn't need me to throw away properly working electronics just because some friggin connector is out of date. Therefore a new AVR is not an option today.

Question: what should I aim for to avoid more hurdles and - the horror - complete de-nerdification?
If you know of a USB surround card that just works with ODROID & CoreELEC please tell me! Or by all means, if you know how to solve the HDMI extraction thing. Any advice much appreciated.

[Sholander]

Question: what should I aim for to avoid more hurdles and - the horror - complete de-nerdification?
If you know of a USB surround card that just works with ODROID & CoreELEC please tell me! Or by all means, if you know how to solve the HDMI extraction thing. Any advice much appreciated.

I presume you'd get more answers by asking your questions in CoreElec forum

[noggin]

Hejsan!

If you take the HDMI Audio extractor out of circuit - and use the same cable to connect your projector and your N2+ running CoreElec directly and play the same sources from SVT Play (*) and your local Hard Drive - do you get pictures?  

(*) SVT Play now includes AC3 5.1 audio on a lot of shows - though I don't know if the Kodi client uses those streams. (Also a lot of high-quality drama on SVT Play is now 10-bit SDR h.265 1080p25 with AC3 5.1 - and some of the live streams are now 50fps not 25)

[bjorsa]

If you take the HDMI Audio extractor out of circuit - and use the same cable to connect your projector and your N2+ running CoreElec directly and play the same sources from SVT Play (*) and your local Hard Drive - do you get pictures? 

Yes, turns out the cables are different! I finally found a short HDMI cable to connect the Odroid to the Extractor, that works for viewing svt.play and movies alike. First one only worked for some movies, second had a green picture, third one actually worked - probably because I took the advice of dancing conterclockwise round my AVR under a full moon before connecting anything. Then sound failed.

No longer any sound from streaming svt.play.
No sound from 4K movies DTS-HD unless I switch language, so I suppose it depends on the type of encoding used on the different sound streams. No idea how to handle it. All the languages presents as "DTS-HD" but half of them don't work.
Sound but no picture from some 1080p movies. No picture nor sound from others. Picture but no sound from another. I mean, come on. Wtf is happening?

I toggled pass-through in the CoreELEC settings (not exactly sure what it means) and only "allow" worked in the 4K movie. I tried swap between "SPDIF" or "HDMI" audio out, but that doesn't seem to change anything. The Extractor feed the AVR through optical SDPIF.
The sound in Kodi is configured to 5.0 (got large front speakers instead of a sub). I got the advice to "use AC3" but found no option for that. I recognise AC3 as a common sound format but don't know what it does here.
There's a switch on the Extractor but it makes no difference wether it's at "TV", "2-ch" or "5.1" so I left it at 5.1 just in case. I read that's default since there's no actual DAC in there anyways.

If I have to stuff a boiled toad's eye into the projector lens, I'll do it, but surely this is far from my idea of plug-and-play? Somebody just kill me, please?

[noggin]

It sounds like you have two issues together :

1. Some of your cables are not fully 4K friendly (there are different versions of 4K that need successively higher-performance cables. I make sure any cable I buy for 4K connections is https://www.hdmi.org/spec/premiumcable licensed with the hologram. These aren't expensive 'Monster' type ridiculous cables, it just confirms the electrical performance is good enough to carry 4K60 4:2:2 etc. without the cable failing (which causes green screens, black screens, intermittent signal loss etc.).  This video failure can be intermittent if you are running with Adjust Refresh Rate or Whitelisting enabled (which are good things) because <30fps signals are easier to carry than >30fps signals in some modes.

2. You need to configure Kodi for 2.0 speaker output if you are using SPDIF audio (not 5.0 - even though you have 5.0 speakers).  That setting is really to set-up your PCM output - and SPDIF only carries a max of 2.0 PCM output (You can't carry 5.1 audio as PCM over SPDIF).  You can enable Dolby Digital Transcode to handle 5.1 audio tracks that your equipment can't bitstream (like FLAC 5.1, AAC 5.1 etc.) when you have 2.0 configured.  (You should have Dolby Digital / AC3 pass through enabled, and possibly DTS if your AVR supports DTS.  You can enable Transcode to Dolby Digital to handle other surround formats - otherwise these will be output as PCM 2.0 stereo mix-downs. Disable Dolby True HD, DTS HD Master Audio and probably Dolby Digital Plus/E-AC3 passthrough as HD Audio can't be passed over SPDIF, and DD+ support is variable)

The TV, 2.0 and 5.1 settings on the Audio Extractor are to tell the box it's plugged in to (in this case your N2+) what audio formats the TV+Extractor combination supports (HDMI uses something called EDID - Extended Display Identification Data) to signal to sources (set-top boxes, DVD/Blu-ray players, ODroid N2s running Kodi etc.) what video and audio functionality the audio extractor+TV support.  In TV mode it just passes through the functionality supported by the TV (or whatever is connected upstream), in 2.0 mode it reports PCM 2.0 mode only (so won't report Dolby Digital support), and in 5.1 mode it reports PCM 2.0 and DD 5.1 (possibly also DTS 5.1 - depends on the extractor) to allow devices to enable Dolby 5.1 output.  Some Kodi implementations ignore EDID for this though - so it may not be relevant.

Important thing to be aware of - SPDIF can only carry PCM 2.0, Dolby Digital and DTS (*) audio - it can't carry Dolby True HD, DTS HD MA, PCM 5.1/7.1 etc.  If you send Dolby True HD, DTS HD MA or PCM 5.1/7.1 audio via HDMI you will get nothing out of the extractor SPDIF output. (*)

Your files are mainly DTS-HD Master Audio - which should have a legacy, lossy DTS core - which is the format that can be carried via SPDIF (You can't carry DTS HD MA or Dolby True HD over SPDIF - the data rate is too high). 

The specs for your Audio Extractor aren't well written so it's not clear if it supports both DTS and Dolby Digital output via SPDIF, or just Dolby Digital.  

Key thing is to ensure in Kodi you have 2.0 speaker output enabled (even though you are using 5.0) and that passthrough is enabled just for Dolby Digital and DTS, and is disabled for DTS HD, Dolby True HD and DD+.  

If you find DTS HD MA stuff still doesn't play, disable DTS passthrough. You should initially get stereo 2.0 output via SPDIF.  With 2.0 speaker configuration you should have a 'Transcode to Dolby / AC3 option' - if you enable that it will convert DTS to DD so you get 5.1 Dolby Digital output of your DTS lossy core from your DTS HD tracks.  This is only required if your audio extractor can't cope with DTS passthrough.

And what you are doing isn't Plug and Play. Plug and Play would be using a modern AVR that can handle HDMI audio, and using short HDMI cables  
(10m cables carrying 18Gb/s of data is non-trivial - that's the approx max data rate of a 4K60 HDR signal - and your audio extractor may not be the worlds best HDMI 2.0b source for your projector - as it is regenerating HDMI )...

(*) There is sometimes some compatibility with DD+ audio via SPDIF - but it's patchy.

[bjorsa]

/writing informative stuff/
Key thing is to ensure in Kodi you have 2.0 speaker output enabled (even though you are using 5.0) and that passthrough is enabled just for Dolby Digital and DTS, and is disabled for DTS HD, Dolby True HD and DD+.  
/writing smart things/

Thanks so much! Your info and advice solved many issues for me. I still can't get 5.1 to work and had to resort to using stereo R/L RCA out, but at least there's sound. The optical SPDIF only worked for a short while two days ago and for the life of me I can't recreate the magic. Some setting somewhere or a glitchy connection maybe. Only works if the Extractor is in 2.0 - but I remember it was in 5.1 back when the sound got through instead of the picture. Can't win them all.

My Sony DB-940 AVR simply won't put out anything by way of pre-out which complicates things since I use a stereo amp downstream to power my front speakers (they are too big for the Sony). Annoying. I may get something similar to this:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/10050026...fromDetail

Should work?

Also, you rock

[bjorsa]

Back when I used a HTPC I drew sound from the 6 coloured 3.5mm audio ports in the back and that was it. Everything worked from square one. All the codecs, all the nonsense, just installed VLC and things played. Feels like we're living through an era of video anarchy and one can only hope the future brings standards, ease of use and ...all the things TV + box/stick brought the non-projector and well-off netflix crowd.

[noggin]

Back when I used a HTPC I drew sound from the 6 coloured 3.5mm audio ports in the back and that was it. Everything worked from square one. All the codecs, all the nonsense, just installed VLC and things played. Feels like we're living through an era of video anarchy and one can only hope the future brings standards, ease of use and ...all the things TV + box/stick brought the non-projector and well-off netflix crowd.

Yeah - analogue audio interconnects have kind of gone the way of the ark in HTPC terms, and SPDIF/Toslink coax/optical is following it rapidly (it won't be around for much longer I suspect).  

Life these days is a lot simpler if you use HDMI for both audio and video (it's like the old SCART analogue SD video connector). It still has the odd issue - but a 4K TV with a 4K AVR makes life a lot, lot simpler - and you get the benefit of lossless HD 5.1/7.1 audio (which you won't get with Toslink/SPDIF).  However TVs have got a lot cheaper over the last few years - so things sort of come out equal. (The cost difference between a 55" or 65" TV a few years ago and now is more than the cost of a half-decent HDMI 4K AVR)

[noggin]

/writing informative stuff/
Key thing is to ensure in Kodi you have 2.0 speaker output enabled (even though you are using 5.0) and that passthrough is enabled just for Dolby Digital and DTS, and is disabled for DTS HD, Dolby True HD and DD+.  
/writing smart things/

Thanks so much! Your info and advice solved many issues for me. I still can't get 5.1 to work and had to resort to using stereo R/L RCA out, but at least there's sound. The optical SPDIF only worked for a short while two days ago and for the life of me I can't recreate the magic. Some setting somewhere or a glitchy connection maybe. Only works if the Extractor is in 2.0 - but I remember it was in 5.1 back when the sound got through instead of the picture. Can't win them all.

My Sony DB-940 AVR simply won't put out anything by way of pre-out which complicates things since I use a stereo amp downstream to power my front speakers (they are too big for the Sony). Annoying. I may get something similar to this:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/10050026...fromDetail

Should work?

Also, you rock

Make sure you power your TV/Projector on first, then the HDMI Audio extractor (this will probably be OK powered at the same time as the TV/Projector), then the N2+ - in that order.   Make sure you have the HDMI extractor in 5.1 mode (if that doesn't work try TV mode - as some TVs accept DD 5.1 over HDMI, so their EDID signalling block will advertise DD 5.1 compatibility with no need for the extractor to add it).

That said - those HDMI Audio Extractors are often quite cheap junk and don't always work reliably.  You may have got a dud...

Hälsningar!