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What wgstarks said. You might be able to gain hd audio with a different operating system like windows or linux - its more an operating system restriction then a hardware restriction...
AppleTV4/iPhone/iPod/iPad: HowTo find debug logs and everything else which the devs like so much:
click here
HowTo setup NFS for Kodi:
NFS (wiki)
HowTo configure avahi (zeroconf):
Avahi_Zeroconf (wiki)
READ THE IOS FAQ!:
iOS FAQ (wiki)
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You're not going to get the HD audio formats, but if your file has it XBMC does a nice job at decoding it through software or whatever it does. I have a lot of my blu-rays dumped to storage. I can't hear the difference, and I have a nice speaker system. A lot of the HD audio stuff is placebo. The reason why OS X doesn't have these formats isn't necessarily because of licensing issues. It's because Apple sees them as pointless and not worth the effort when most people won't have speaker systems capable of playing it hooked up to a Mac and the people who do won't be able to tell the difference anyway. If it was something that was truly important to some people there'd be third party drivers of some kind to do it.
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It is actually not normal that Apple does not natively support HD audio.
I doubt they will change their policy ...
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One solution is to rip your blu-rays with makemkv and use the flac profile. This works perfectly.
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2014-08-15, 06:13
(This post was last modified: 2014-08-15, 06:24 by TamaraKama.)
Short answer: No, you would not get Dolby TrueHD audio passed through by converting the soundtrack to FLAC. Although it is a "lossless" format that you can use provided you are using HDMI and have the requisite number of channels enabled via Audio MIDI setup and XBMC configured to output to those channels.
Long answer: The idea behind converting a Dolby TrueHD or DTS-MA track to FLAC is you'd then have a lossless track that you could run via LPCM 5.1 or 7.1 channels via HDMI. Your receiver would not see it as the former as it would at that point have been converted to a completely different lossless audio codec.
Furthermore Optical Digital connections aren't adequate for "lossless 7.1" audio (they don't have enough bandwidth to bitstream them apparently and also can only do up to 2 LPCM channels) and yes, you would need an HDMI audio connection and 7.1 channels enabled in Audio MIDI setup. If you ran the FLAC track via the optical cable it'd just be converted to Dolby Digital (AC3) 5.1 on the fly... which then you would be back to lossy.
You wouldn't have been able to get Dolby TrueHD or DTS-MA via the optical cable even if Mac OS supported it. HDMI cables are required.
Lastly, the only reason you'd have to select an option in XBMC menus is if you included multiple audio tracks in your video. If FLAC is the only track you include in the MKV it'll just automatically play.
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2014-08-15, 18:49
(This post was last modified: 2014-08-15, 18:54 by FernetMenta.)
Why would you convert TrueHD to Flac? Decoding TrueHD gives you exactly the same result as decoding Flac.
EDIT: further it is pointless converting DTS-HD MA with makemkv. makemkv uses ffmpeg just like XBMC and ffmpeg currently can only decode the core of DTS-HD MA.
