[mythtv-users] HDMI and Audio Return Channel

[William Powers]

On Sep 30, 2012, at 8:41 PM, Phill Edwards <philledwards at gmail.com> wrote:

> I have just bought a new HDMI cable which supports Audio Return
> Channel and I wanted to understand better what this will allow me to
> do.
> 
> 99% of the time I want to watch TV recordings and play the sound back
> through the TV speakers. That's what I've been doing to date with my
> existing DVI --> HDMI cable. But I also have an AV receiver and I'd
> like to set things up so that when I play a DVD from MythFrontend the
> sound plays through the receiver so that I get Dolby 5.1, DTS etc.
> 
> Will this fancy new HDMI cable with Audio Return Channel allow me to
> do that somehow? If not, what's the best way of achieving that?

ARC will allow you to use your TV Input selector as your primary video source selector, but your TV will only route audio it knows what to do with. So, in my case, I have the Satellite STB and Myth (for TV recordings) hooked up to the TV and I use the TV input selector to switch between them and the sound plays through the audio amp in stereo or Dolby 5.1, depending on the program.

However, when I had the BD player hooked up this way, it played DVD's fine but BluRay disks only played in stereo because the TV didn't know how to route DTS-HD.  My solution was to connect the BD player (only) to the audio amp. So, when I want to play a video disk, I select the amp input and everything works. For WAF purposes, the amp input is labelled 'DVD'.

For ARC to work my TV audio has to be set for external amp vice internal speakers. So I would have to change that setting to use the TV speakers. However, with CEC enabled, the amp switches itself on whenever the TV is on so I just use the amp for sound all the time. If you really want to switch back and forth, HDMI passthrough is your best bet, as Greg suggested.