Apple TV 4 with tvOS 14.3 no longer able to passthrough AC3 Audio

Unfortunately all my Apple TV's are long out of warranty.

Sweet! And if you can block it from accessing these addresses, it won’t nag you every day to update to 14.x

mesu.apple.com

appldnld.apple.com

swscan.apple.com

xp.apple.com

gdmf.apple.com

Turned up in 14.0 for me, because that’s when I joined the beta programme to report the bug it in every beta right up to 14.2 RC. (Which obviously was a waste of time...)

Doesn’t that just mix down to stereo AAC? (Or do you mean it stops the ‘freezes’ issue if you manually select AC3)

I guess its just producing stereo output. My main point was that the Apple TV presets in Handbrake don't always work as desired. Try some of the other presets or customised settings.

Although you are correct about the fact that the textbook format contains two audio files, that format was deprecated some time ago. The only actual issue in the current version of TVOS is that no homemade video files can be played with real 5.1 surround sound, regardless of the format.

I'm a retired Mac support specialist. I worked to support Apple users who were members of faculty or staff at a local university. I have no illusions that Apple will ever do anything to promote anyone other than itself. If Apple decides to again support the 5.1 surround sound format for Home Sharing videos, I think that would be fantastic. But in the meantime, I'm looking for a third party solution that will let me stream movies containing 5.1 surround sound audio from my video library to my 5.1 surround sound system. If you can recommend an alternative to Apple Home Sharing, I'm eager to try it.

Unfortunately, I consider the advantages of tvOS 14 to be too important to consider using an older version. Anyway, I don't think Apple should force me to choose between versions to get features that were previously available.

Current tvOS 14.5 beta 1 brings back Dolby Digital 5.1 sound! 😀

Interesting though is that even movies the only got a stereo track encoded are now playing in 5.1 while others don't. Not sure if the ATV does some Dolby surround decoding now.

That’s good news. I switched to Plex anyway after realising the Plex Apple TV app is not only better than Apple’s own Computers/Home Sharing ... but also not affected by the Dolby Digital 5.1 bug! 🙂 But yeah since the bug was also affecting some 3rd party apps (Like the already mentioned Surround Sound Check app) it would be worth testing that too when the 14.5 RC is released 👍

I can very happily confirm updating to the 14.5 beta fixed the issue for me as well! It also fixed the freezing/crashing behavior with AC3 files. I have a lot of files that only contain a 5.1 stream, no stereo, so that was a big pain for me. There does seem to be a little bit of instability in the build at this point but it's a beta so I'm happy.

For my system only titles played using the Computers app have stopped playing with multichannel audio. If I stream a title from the iTunes app, 5.1 surround sound audio is correctly rendered.

But if you bought them from the iTunes Store, you don't have to play them using Home Sharing. You can play them using the iTunes app, which allows them to play correctly (with 5.1 surround sound).

When playing this movie in tvOS 14.5 Beta...

3MB Video

...is there proper channel separation? Does the subwoofer work?

A while ago I started using the Android 1080 preset in Handbrake because, bizarrely, the Apple TV preset became unreliable. See if that makes a difference.