Emby not playing high res 5.1 or 7.1 audio on Formuler z11 pro max

[daf78 1]

I cannot get Emby to play any media with advanced audio, like DTS-HD MA 5.1 and 7.1 or TrueHD 5.1 and 7.1.

I've got a Formuler z11 pro max directly connected with a ultra high speed hdmi cable to a Samsung Q990D soundbar. The same formats seems to play fine through both MOL3 and Kodi. If I disable surround sound on system level the movies plays just fine. When trying to play with surround Emby loads the movie and then just freezes. I get a still image if I'm lucky, other times the screen goes black and Emby stops responding completely until I restart the box. I've tried both Emby for Android TV and the other (just) Emby.

According to the Formuler devs passthrough should just work and in other apps that seems to be true. The soundbar should definitely support all formats known to man.

I've factory reset the box multiple times, reset the soundbar, tried other cables etc etc. With Kodi the soundbar at least tells me that it receives multi-channel pcm. I guess that's not entirely optimal but since I'm not very knowledgable in audio formats I'm not sure what it's supposed to say. At this point I'm not sure which of the components are to blame so I hope that someone can steer me in the right direction.

Transcoding is not an option since I'd like to receive the original sound and video + my NAS cannot handle it due to it being a newer Synology.

I'm middle aged, stupid and overwhelmed by all these sound formats. I just want to be blown away by my new soundbar, please help!

 

embyserver.txt

Edited January 18, 2025 by daf78

[PrincessClevage 175]

Does this box support multichannel truehd ?

https://www.formuler.tv/z11promax

 

[daf78 1]

Amazingly, I've just gotten everything to work on Kodi. The soundbar now shows Atmos and DTL-HD and all sound from all media plays fine. It seems I can finally conclude that it's Emby that isn't working properly. So yes, the box seems to support passthrough of multi-channel TrueHD and even DTS:X!

[rbjtech 5284]

8 hours ago, daf78 said:

Amazingly, I've just gotten everything to work on Kodi. The soundbar now shows Atmos and DTL-HD and all sound from all media plays fine. It seems I can finally conclude that it's Emby that isn't working properly. So yes, the box seems to support passthrough of multi-channel TrueHD and even DTS:X!

Emby passes through all the HD Audio codecs just fine - on hardware that supports them.

I find it very strange that the formuler.tv specs page for this hardware doesn't even mention the basic audio codecs such as Dolby Digital, yet alone HD Audio codecs, leading me to believe it a cheap clone and 'support' for them is unofficial at best.     Emby is reading the capabilities via the Android OS - and it is likely reporting they are not supported (true).   Kodi has it's own lower level drivers, which is likely why that 'works' .. but on any software using the Android API .. it is unlikely to work.

btw - multi-channel PCM simply means it's decoded on the client, rather than the soundbar - but you'll lose all Atmos and DTS:X data as a consequence.  (and again - this is because the client is not being told or doesn't support the codecs)

After many years, the only mainstream box that officially supports all the HD Audio Codecs is the Nvidia Shield Pro - it's remains expensive for a reason, licenses from Dolby (for both audio and video) and DTS are official ..

Edited January 18, 2025 by rbjtech

[daf78 1]

Thanks for your input. Formuler is quite good at fulfilling its primary purpose and although it's a bummer it doesn't play nicely with Emby I now have a backup solution at least. But yeah, I might ask Santa for a Shield one day. Nice as your reply was @rbjtech I'd rather not mark it as solution. These boxes are getting fairly popular so it would be nice if someone could dig a little deeper.