Roku Ultra Does Not play DTS-HD MA 7.1

[speechles 2084]

13 hours ago, One2Go said:

Still don't get it why the DTS-HD MA 5.1 gets flaged for transcoding and the DTS-HD MA 7.1 does not.

Think of DTS as either 5.1 or 7.1. The Roku can play DTS. The Roku cannot play lossless streams. It must always use the DTS "core". Even if you have DTS-HD MA in 6 channel, rather than 8, the Roku isn't playing the lossless stream. It is playing the lossy "core" from the DTS stream.

DTS should pass-through. The player just goes hmm.. whatever.. here is the stream. Untouched. Passes it down the wire. Just puts it out on the pass-through audio stream. After that.. it is up to your equipment to decode that or remove the DTS "core" from the stream and play it.

This is why you must both enable pass-through then rather than use "Auto" use "Custom" and choose which codecs to allow. Usually DD5.1 and DTS turned on. Then restart the Roku. After that the Roku now understands you want DTS to pass-through. It is doing this because you hear silence with 8 channel DTS. That must mean the pass-through is working, or it means Roku isn't passing through the DTS to the receiver. But it does mean the Roku is doing it since this shows as Direct Play. 

@ebrDo you have a TV that supports DTS which can connect to a Roku? I do not or I would do this myself to test. Simply disable audio transcoding for a test user. Then play that file with that test user that has DTS-HD MA in 8 channels. Can you hear the lossy DTS "core" playing from the DTS-HD MA track? or do you also hear silence? If you also hear silence this is most certainly a recent Roku firmware bug.

Edited 2 hours ago by speechles

[rotational467 45]

3 hours ago, pünktchen said:

The DTS Core is usually embedded within the lossless DTS HD-MA track, so it cannot be "deleted" without re-encoding the audio. Most Blu-rays have a seperate DTS only track, that's what you can deselect within MakeMKV.

You're correct, my memory is failing me. At some point in the past pre-emby I had some kind of setup that couldn't handle DTS-MA at all, and including the separate DTS track was the workaround. It became part of my standard rip workflow and I forgot why.

Testing on my Ultra (Roku OS 15.2 4.3442-C2, latest Emby app, local network) shows expected behavior - it is not passing through DTS-MA, 5.1 or 7.1, but it is passing the DTS core properly for both. Receiver reports standard DTS streams while Emby shows direct play of the DTS-MA streams. On the Roku the Streaming Format is Auto and Digital Output is passthrough.

[tedfroop21 96]

1 hour ago, speechles said:

The Roku can play DTS.

Roku does nothing but pass through DTS.  It only "plays" Dolby formats.

IE: All Roku does is steer the audio stream to a device to decode it.

I had issues when I started here and came to understand DTS is a three way negotiation between Emby, the Sink Device (TV) and the AVR and all three must be capable of handling the 7.1 stream or you get 5.1.   After updating my Sink device (TV), no problems playing DTS-MA