Just in case this helps anyone stumbling across this post: I followed dom's advice (thanks very much) and installed Kodi. It worked!
I'm sure VLC would have managed it with the correct settings, but I hate messing about with trial and error. Kodi worked pretty much "out of the box", although it defaults to stereo output, so had to change that to 5.1ch and enable passthrough (easily done).
The files themselves obviously have to have either AC3 or DTS audio compression (not E-AC3 or DTS-HD, or Atmos etc, any of the hi-def ones) because it's using passthrough, and I found that recoding with Avidemux lost a lot of quality. It's time-consuming too, but it does work.
My eventual solution (not really relevant to RPI Forums, but maybe of help to someone with my original issue and an old console lying around) was to use a PS4 with USB file source and HDMI output into splitter (HDMI video + optical audio). Set the PS4 audio output to DTS compression (AC3 fine too... just not uncompressed PCM). This way, I don't have to recode audio for each file. As long as the PS4 understands the file's codecs (e.g. H264 video, not H265), it will play the file and output audio with DTS compression. AV receiver gets 5.1ch every time with no discernible reduction in audio quality. Happy days!
I'm sure VLC would have managed it with the correct settings, but I hate messing about with trial and error. Kodi worked pretty much "out of the box", although it defaults to stereo output, so had to change that to 5.1ch and enable passthrough (easily done).
The files themselves obviously have to have either AC3 or DTS audio compression (not E-AC3 or DTS-HD, or Atmos etc, any of the hi-def ones) because it's using passthrough, and I found that recoding with Avidemux lost a lot of quality. It's time-consuming too, but it does work.
My eventual solution (not really relevant to RPI Forums, but maybe of help to someone with my original issue and an old console lying around) was to use a PS4 with USB file source and HDMI output into splitter (HDMI video + optical audio). Set the PS4 audio output to DTS compression (AC3 fine too... just not uncompressed PCM). This way, I don't have to recode audio for each file. As long as the PS4 understands the file's codecs (e.g. H264 video, not H265), it will play the file and output audio with DTS compression. AV receiver gets 5.1ch every time with no discernible reduction in audio quality. Happy days!
Statistics: Posted by pish_flaps — Wed Jul 03, 2024 3:16 pm