I just bought a cheap Sony Blu-Ray player (non-UHD), and there were no settings in the menu for configuring audio formats supported by whatever is connected to the other end of the HDMI cable. Despite that, it works perfectly, sending only what my AVR supports.
It also does the same thing if connected directly to the TV, where it decodes and down-mixes instead of sending TrueHD, DTS, etc. So, it’s at least possible to do.
I would think the best place to put it would be in “My OSMC”, like the remote setup. Users would only run it if they wanted to, and it would set the Kodi settings that fit what is discovered. It could also be run the first time Kodi starts, as part of the OOB experience.
This was considered, but it now seems that a lot of users split audio to a sound bar. Developing this in a platform agnostic way would also be tricky.
I was thinking this would be limited to hardware that is sold in the OSMC store with the OS pre-loaded.
There’s no way you can deal with every random HDMI implementation that might exist, especially in the x86 world.
In theory this could be done on the Vero 4K.
The best place IMO would be in the audio settings. Instead of choosing what to pass through, a button for ‘auto-detect’.
I thought about that, but it would require a change to a Kodi menu that is populated with other stuff, and is skin-dependent. Doing that only on certain hardware means hardware checking code inside Kodi (in Python, I asume) to see if you are running on hardware where you can do this.
Putting it someplace like My OSMC still has it “inside Kodi”, but since control of that add-on is completely with @sam_nazarko & Co., it can be built differently for different hardware, and apt can handle which version is actually on the disk.
We have just added variable LFE mixing to that page so it can be done the same way I would think.
Is that hardware-dependent, though? Meaning, does the UI change depending on the hardware?