Samsung Q990B - FireTV 4k Max - No TrueHD / Atmos

[Hakeeeem 1]

Hello the community, 

I have been searching the existing threads for 2 days, and although few ones where closely similar to my issue, it was not exactly the same and/or the fix was not working for me when there was one.

I have to admit, I'm beginning to lose my mind over this, it is starting to drive me nuts.

To give some background, I recently upgraded my sound system from a Yamaha YSP 2700 that served me well for 5 years, to a Samsung Q990B soundbar.

My PC is hosting the server and the media files, and I am connected on 1Ghz ethernet network.

My client is running on Fire TV 4k max also connected with ethernet, and I have a 75" 4k TCL tv for the display.

In my initial setup, my fire tv was hooked on the tv through HDMI, and my tv hooked to the soundbar with HDMI over the eARC ports.

This was not working at all when I wanted to play the 7.1 TrueHD stream, and was only working if I changed to a secondary audio stream, such as DTS or 5.1.

Next I tried to hook the fire tv directly to the soundbar, and I saw some improvement here, as I now was able to play the default audio stream (TrueHD 7.1), however, using the nerds stats I found out it was somewhat decoding the audio.

Both the fire tv and the soundbar are supposed to support Dolby Atmos, however, it appears that when I play a file,  for a few seconds, the audio is showing TrueHD  Direct Play, to then switch to : Software Decode.

I have also noticed when I pressed info on the soundbar remote, that the audio was played in PCM, I don't know why.

I'm not very experienced with this type of setup and ask your forgiveness if this post is not clear, or lacking details, with some guidance, I will be happy to provide more infos that could help to get through this.

Thank you 

embyserver.txt

Edited February 15, 2023 by Hakeeeem

[Hakeeeem 1]

And I just noticed, after playing for few minutes it just freeze and hang, no idea why.

[rbjtech 4333]

Simply put - the Amazon FireTV Stick 4K Max does not support TrueHD (lossless HD Audio) - it only supports EAC3 with Atmos (lossy Audio)

https://www.developer.amazon.com/docs/fire-tv/device-specifications-fire-tv-streaming-media-player.html

Emby is therefore attempting to extract the AC3 'core' from the THD stream or it may be converting to an AC3 stream if one does not exist (hence the 'software decode').

The latest FireTV Cube (Gen 3) does do THD passthrough but it still does not do DTS-HD MA/X passthough.

For HD Audio - the best Emby client is still the Shield 2019 Pro - it will play all HD Audio formats (THD/THD Atmos/DTS-HD:MA/DTS-HD:X) to your soundbar without any conversion required.

Edited February 15, 2023 by rbjtech

[Hakeeeem 1]

21 minutes ago, rbjtech said:

Simply put - the Amazon FireTV Stick 4K Max does not support TrueHD (lossless HD Audio) - it only supports EAC3 with Atmos (lossy Audio)

https://www.developer.amazon.com/docs/fire-tv/device-specifications-fire-tv-streaming-media-player.html

Emby is therefore attempting to extract the AC3 'core' from the THD stream or it may be converting to an AC3 stream if one does not exist (hence the 'software decode').

The latest FireTV Cube (Gen 3) does do THD passthrough but it still does not do DTS-HD MA/X passthough.

For HD Audio - the best Emby client is still the Shield 2019 Pro - it will play all HD Audio formats (THD/THD Atmos/DTS-HD:MA/DTS-HD:X) to your soundbar without any conversion required.

 

Thank you for your prompt response, I'm somewhat glad it is not my setup and actually a device limitation problem from the fire tv.

I will try to find a shield pro in that case, hopefully it fixes my problem.