[mythtv-users] All TV plays back as stereo and not surround over HDMI

[Jean-Yves Avenard]

On 14 January 2013 11:01, Brendon Costa <brendon.j.costa at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I have a Myth setup using a combined frontend/backend setup using mythbuntu
> 12.04.1 (running mythtv 0.25 I think)
>
> I have had it setup for maybe 6 months now using stereo + video over HDMI to
> my receiver. I recently however setup surround speakers for 5.1 and am
> trying to get surround to work.
>
> I have read all sorts of instructions about this and it is a confusing mess
> of what does/doesn't work with conflicting instructions in all sorts of
> places. I am able to get surround channels working in ALSA using the
> speaker-test:
> speaker-test -Dhdmi:CARD=NVidia,DEV=0 -c6
>
> when i use the frontend setup, I can set to 5.1 and the speaker tests work
> (well in both the speaker-test and frontend test the channel mapping is
> incorrect, but I think I can fix that later). The issue is that all recorded
> TV seems to always playback in stereo only.

if channel mapping is incorrect over hdmi, it's most likely that it's
your cabling that is wrong

>
> I read a few instructions, some say use the 5.1 config in the the mythtv
> frontend setup and other instructions say set to stereo and it will do
> passthrough of the DTS etc to the reciever. Neither gave me surround (unless
> I specified to up-convert the stereo to 5.1, which is not what I want). If i
> have the option I would like to enable passthrough.

Then it sounds like your original media is stereo only.

Are your recording directly or are you running the transcode job on
the recordings?