I lose surround sound when playing transcoded media

[theolaa]

Hello,

I've been having an irritating problem where when transcoding, my receiver no longer detects surround sound. It doesn't happen all the time, but it happens more often than not. I have an LG C3 TV and it outputs audio to my PIONEER Elite VSXLX305 receiver over HDMI eARC. It's particularly noticeable when I try to use a subtitle format that requires transcoding (DVDSUB and PGSUB seem to always do that for me), and the surround sound that was previously working on that same video file stops working when I put the subtitles on. Sometimes the playback info window says transcoding to 6 channels, sometimes it says 2 channels (even if the source is 6 channel).

Has anyone else experienced this or possibly know the cause? Any tips on how to continue troubleshooting?

Thanks,

[gnattu]

Probably this: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-webos/issues/275

LG TVs for some reason will refuse to play multichannel audio as is in HLS streams. If that is the case you have to pre-transcode your media in mp4 container to make your TV happy.

[theolaa]

When you say pre-transcode, do you mean alter the source media so Jellyfin can direct play?

[felix920506]

Yes, you will have to convert the file to a format that the client can direct play.

[theolaa]

I tried remuxing with ffmpeg (ffmpeg -i source.mkv -map 0 -c copy destination.mp4), and I also tried re-encoding with Handbrake and both seem to behave exactly the same way as before. I will try re-encoding with AAC instead of EAC3 and see if that makes a difference.

[gnattu]

> and both seem to behave exactly the same way as before

Did you even try to force set the output channel count to 5.1 in Settings->Audio settings on your TV?

[theolaa]

Just tried that, that seems to make everything forced to stereo for some reason. On auto I get surround sound like expected.

[theolaa]

I tried it out on a billion different codecs and containers: EAC3, AAC, DTS, AC3, mkv, mp4, etc.. It only seems to matter if it's transcoding or not (even bitrate-limiting transcoding reduces to stereo, not just subtitle burning). It really does seem like it's either the transcoded format from Jellyfin, or the passthrough of the HLS from my TV, which really sucks. Any other workarounds or solutions anyone can think of other than getting different subtitles (probably SRT) and playing direct-playable media?