Evening all, I was very excited to see support for surround sound audio file rolled into today’s release and immediately tried out some files with, unfortunately, mixed results.
First of all let me say that I have never had any trouble outputting AC3 audio from my ATV2 to my amp via the stock software and movies with AC3 and DTS tracks also play back just fine with firecore Media and XBMC (when I still used the latter).
I tried a few different AC3 file types with 4.0 and 5.1 tracks and different bitrates and all worked fine.
I tried playing back a 44.1kHz, 1411kb/s, 5.1 DTS track and got nothing but static. These files are ripped from a DTS-CD (hence the CD standard sample rate). However, a 48kHz, 1536kb/s 5.1 DTS file (ripped from a Bluray disc) played back absolutely fine. My guess is that there’s some up-sampling of the 44.1kHz file going on that’s mangling the audio. I have a decent library of DTS-CD discs I’d like to incorporate into my system and playback of 44.1kHz files would be great in a future release.
Thanks for taking the time to implement this support, it’s really appreciated and such a shame that we’ve all but accepted the fact that we’re hardware limited to 16/48 for stereo audio output. 24/96 would have been lovely but I guess it’s never gonna happen on this little black box 