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videos are encoded AAC which HDMI ARC doesn’t support.
Are you sure HDMI ARC doesn't support that? It has been along time since I looked into this but It is my understanding HDMI ARC supports whatever Optical S/PDIF supports and more as it has a higher Audio bandwidth. Basically you would almost always pick HDMI ARC over Optical unless you had some very specific cases like long distances cable runs or lack of physical connections for example.
My TV must be doing the conversion because optical audio is surround sound but HDMI ARC is stereo and it sounds terrible because it must be passing through only a couple channels. Maybe the spec supports it but the soundbar only supports DTS/AC3 and maybe it’s just the TV combo that is not allowing it to work correctly. I was reading up on the HDMI ARC spec and it sounded like AAC was not supported until ARC 2?
I have an HDMI ARC surround setup also, and it doesn’t support eARC. It will do DTS/DolbyDigital+ surround but will only do PCM stereo, and my TV stupidly doesn’t support DTS. I use an Apple TV which converts everything surround to DD+ (but leaves stereo PCM lossless) and that works well enough for me
Eventually I plan to upgrade to an eARC setup that supports PCM surround pass through, and then quality should be better without conversion and my Nintendo will finally do surround
Under my TV’s audio digital output format selection it says “select pass through to hear unmodified dolby or dts audio using ARC. If dolby or dts passthrough is not possible, you’ll hear stereo.” It lets me choose custom but can’t get it to use the AAC surround unless I use optical.
That makes sense, the TV won’t convert it for you only pass through what it can. You would either need to convert the AAC to AC3 so it can pass through properly, or use a set-top-box that can force/convert it on the fly
So back to my origin question. Jellyfin supports transcoding so can it support device specific profiles where I can force it to transcode all audio to ac3 for specific decices?
I know there are some device profiles under the DLNA settings.
I don't know if those just apply to DLNA or not. I haven't played with it myself.
That’s what I had heard as well. Maybe this is a new feature request for the project developers.
AAC isn't supported by any hardware as far as I know. Optical won't pass that either.
I use Kodi on the Android TV device to transcode it to Dolby Digital.
Interesting. Can you tell me more about your setup? A Jellyfin server (does it need a plugin?) then TV is running Kodi client which connects to Jellyfin and your transcoding settings are configured on the Kodi client? Is that right or am I missing something?
I do the same thing but with an Apple TV and infuse
Jellyfin server running on PC
Android TV box (nvidia shield pro) running Jellyfin Client, but configured to send the video to Kodi, which seems to have much higher support for the various formats.
The Shield Pro is plugged into an AVR which is plugged into the TV.
Kodi configured to pass through all formats for me, but you'd be limited to Dolby Digital and DTS. Oddly you need to leave Kodi in 2.0 mode to see an option to transcode AAC to Dolby Digital.
Thanks for the write up. I am currently using a Roku TV with the Jellyfin client running on it. I’ll need to look into Kodi and sounds like I might need an AVR or set top box. It would be nice if these things (TVs, soundbars) were more open. Maybe we need an open source soundbar firmware, then I could permanently disable Alexa and maybe make use of it’s networking capabilities.