My Pi is connected to my TV w/ an hdmi cable. The TV has an optical digital audio out. This digital audio output is connected to my DTS/DD capable receiver (that has no hdmi in port). Playing video files or DVD’s w/ Dolby Digital (= AC3) multi channel audio works just fine (w/ pass though of the digital audio to my receiver). However, I’m pretty sure that my TV won’t pass throuh DTS digital surround 5.1 sound (link).
When I try to play a DVD w/ DTS audio then I hear only static. Is that because the Pi or the Kodi version in OSMC won’t pass through DTS? Or is it because my TV might not pass through the DTS signal?
Most TV’s don’t pass DTS through to optical. See here for a report.
If you have a Pi2 you can try disabling omxplayer and disabling DTS passthrough, enabling AC3 passthrough and enabling AC3 transcode. Then DTS audio will be decoded by Pi and re-encoded to AC3 which should work.
To get around this I bought a device the splits the HDMI signal from the TV to video (to Raspberry Pi) and 5.1 audio (to receiver using optical). The good news is it worked, however it created video quality issues. There was a lot of weird blocks on the video. It was completely watch-able and some may not have noticed it…maybe its called artifacing? Anyway, I decided not to use it any more.
WoW! Never realized that Kodi can re-encode to AC3 on the fly! I use a Raspberry Pi B (not the “2”) and I’m pretty sure that its CPU is to slow to do this on the fly.
Anyway, I discovered how to re-encode the DTS to AC3, my personal Help txt file about this reads as follows (I use Linux):
General info:
- The output of a DTS-CD over s/pdif may not be upsampled from 44.1 kHz to 48 kHz. The DTS .wav files that must be burned to CD will not play in Kodi.
- DTS-CD images may be provided w/ a .cue file. That is a text file that contains the times that each track is started. It is readable by Kodi. When you've converted the bin/wav/cue to another format and filename then you can simply edit this cue file w/ a text editor.
Converting:
~~~~~~~~~~~
1. If the DTS-CD is in iso or bin image form: try to rip it to wav (and a cue file).
2. Example: 'XXXXXXX'. That's one .wav file with a .cue file.
3. Convert it to "real DTS wav" by cutting out empty spaces or something like that... Use the Windos/DOS program BeSplit.exe: `
wine ./BeSplit.exe -core\( -input RW-ATD-DTS.wav -prefix fixed -type dtswav -fix \)
`The backslashes are escape characters.
4. You'll end up w/ a file called 'fixed01.dtswav' that can be played by Kodi.
5. One might convert this file even further. But that will probably result in quality loss because both DTS and AC3 are lossy compression formats. To convert the fixed dtswav to Dolby Digital AC3 5.1 do:`
dcadec -o wavall fixed01.dtswav | aften - fixed01.ac3
`
6. Kodi wants the extension .wav for the DTS file and .ac3 for the AC3 one.
7. I'd like to know how to convert this AC3 file to a DVD (i.e. make it into an MPEG2 file w/ chapters as the tracks).
The original Raspberry Pi B is too slow to transcode to multi channel AC3, yes. But the Raspberry Pi 2 is apparently more than fast enough to do this well. Maybe time for an upgrade ?
After using a Raspbery Pi 2 since they came out I can barely stand to go back to my Pi 1’s and they mostly sit on the shelf except when being used for OSMC testing…the difference in performance is that much.
Well this was annoying… So i thought i would give the convertor another go with tbis config edit… Firstly i had troubles gettin a signal from tv… TV reset fixed that. Then after reset i couldn’t get CEC working on my panny remote. So i downloaded Kore. Then after a restart i couldn’t. Get the Pi to connect back to the the wired network. I gave up after that. What a drama. Tomorrow i will revet it all back, try putting the command line in THEN switch to the converter.
Could it be i am asking to much on my Pi B? I am using micro usb carger into tv for power. Class 10 sd card. Although everything is fine when i run without the convertor. Just no 5.1 audio.
