I have an audio issue Im trying to work through, which from my searching seems a little different to all the other previous posts - my apologies if its not!
Ive had my vero 4k’s since they were first released and always worked on a “setup and then leave the hell alone rule” with no updates or changes. Everything worked perfectly for probably 5 years until I was forced to do major updates (my remote control system stopped communicating via IP to the previous version).
Since that update - which is itself a year or 2 ago now (live gets busy!) I have never managed to get audio working correctly. My system is Vero4k to AVR to TV, all via HDMI. I have HDMI passthrough set in my AVR, so that it doesnt need to be on in order to watch content on the TV. Previously the audio worked flawlessly, in the sense that if the AVR was off, the TV received an audio stream via the HDMI that it could deal with and play in stereo; as soon as the AVR was turned on, it would receive a passthrough stream from the Vero4k (apologies if my terminology is wrong there) which allowed it to process all formats, DTS-HD, Dolby True HD, etc.
Since I updated, I can only get it working one way or the other via the Vero settings. If i enable audio passthrough, everything works perfectly via the AVR - but if I turn the AVR off I get no audio through the TV (or for some files, I get some audio, but no dialog). If i disable audio passthrough, then the TV audio works fine when the AVR is off, but when it turns on the AVR reverts to simply outputting basic Pro Logic audio.
Am I missing something here - should my use case actually even work in the first place, or do I have a setting wrong someone that I havnt come across? And/or do I have a version that needs another update, as I suspect Im not on the latest version that a Vero 4k can reach (appreciate that its now end of life support).
Thought Id post my question before saving some debug logs (which Ive never done before) in case Im trying to do the impossible anyway…
It is common that TV’s can only deal with Stereo LPCM, and AC3. As such, if you have your channels setting set to something more than 2.0 you will likely get missing audio from everywhere but L+R channels. If you try to feed the TV an HD audio format it likely will output noise or nothing if it does not have the ability to decode it.
One option for dealing with this is to just configure Kodi to output AC3 and enable transcoding. In this way when your AVR is off your TV will be able to correctly play all audio and remux multichannel to stereo, while at the same time if you turn your AVR on then it can do the surround thing assuming that is what you have. The downside to this is that if your AVR can do higher quality audio codecs then your missing out on that quality boost.
Another way to go about it is to configure your channels to 2.0 and then enable all the passthrough options your AVR supports. Then when you switch between playing audio on the TV or AVR you can either manually go into the audio settings and toggle the passthrough on/off, or for a more sane approach keymap a button on your remote with a “audiotoggledigital” action so you swap back and forth with just a button press.
The last option that comes to mind is installing the “Audio Profiles” add-on which would work somewhat similar to the previous option.
Cheers mate, thanks heaps for that answer. It sounds like I may be mis-remembering then, and that it never actually worked that way I would have liked even years ago, as it doesnt seem like that could be possible.
Given that Im trying to control everything with an RTI remote system, it would be easy to add another command in to toggle audio when the AVR switches on. I presume the command is actually turning passthrough on and off in the background? Ill have to scroll through the wiki now on hoe to do that, as I dont think Ive ever messed around with mapping extra keys.
Install the “Keymap Editor” addon from Kodi’s repository. If you have a button that you are going to dedicate to this function (ie the button does the same function regardless of what Kodi window is active) it is just a matter of something like open Keymap Editor>edit>global>audio>toggle digital/analog>(press the button your mapping the action to)>press your back key till your on that first screen and hit save.
Ive messed around with a keyboard.xml file in the first instance and it seems to work exactly as Id hoped - audiotoggledigital seems to just turn passthrough on and off. Ive managed to tie myself in knots a little because some of my video files seem to be behaving differently and the issue I had with many of the files seems to have disappeared anyway - although any files I have with DTS-HD MA still exhibit it (ie: no sound from the TV with the AVR off when passthrough is on). In a broader sense I think I need to research more how the audio files themselves behave because Im confused as hell now!
A follow on question though; is there a hard command which turns passthrough on, and another which turns it off? Im struggling with my remote control system in knowing which state the system is in at any given time - and a toggle command doesnt help with that. Is that potentially where the Audio Profile add-on comes into play?
If you have “channels” in your Kodi audio settings configured to “2.0” and passthrough turned off then your TV should get sound for everything correctly as Kodi should convert and downsample everything that isn’t already stereo LPCM to this format which your TV will happily play.
I think the only Kodi action for passthrough is the toggle option that I had already pointed out. I don’t know much about the audio profile add-on other than it exists for people who want quick access to more than one audio configuration with a minimum of fuss. There should be plenty of information about it on Kodi’s forum and I assume their github.