Netflix audio is only 2-channel stereo, not 5.1 when using Chromecast?

[Craig King]

I just had a fun conversation with Netflix support. I wanted to dig into this a bit deeper with them.

I found a show that when loaded showed 5.1 as the audio. But didn't present any multi-channel stream, just stereo. It occurred to me that the show predated Dolby Digital Plus by a few years. This ment it had to be encoded in the older Dolby Digital 5.1 originally. I contacted support at Netflix and managed to get them to contact a engineer. The conversation was fairly interesting. The long and short of it is that they will stream whatever audio format they have be it stereo, Dolby Digital 5.1 or Dolby Digital Plus.

From early on I have suspected that the Chromecast hasn't been handling Dolby Digital 5.1 at all. With the above understanding of how Netflix handles their formats it is reasonable to believe that some of Netflix's 5.1 content won't stream in 5.1 if my suspicions are right.

So I guess my question is has anyone that has gotten 5.1 audio from the CC seen Dolby Digital 5.1 as the encoded audio stream. I am going to try some movies and see what I find but so far the only multi-channel format i have seen work is DD+

 

[AaronTV]

Now that you mention it, I've only seen DD+ appear on the receiver thus far.

Posted via Android Central App

 

[Craig King]

Yea. after I posted that last night i just sat down and tired at random various content. I could't get netflix to stream the older Dolby Digital 5.1 , but at the same time I also didn't run into another occasion where 5.1 didn't come down when the content was marked as supporting it. I did find quite a bit that pushed Dolby Digital Plus, but not all by any means.

The example I found that didn't work was Eureka. The interesting thing about it was it appears the first season doesn't have a 5.1 stream, yet when i jumped to the last season my AVR did detect a DD+ multi-channnel stream. In the conversation with Netflix, the engineer gave the impression that TV shows in particular are prone to having this issue as i guess not all of the the content may have multi-channel encoding.

 

[audioguy61]

I am also having difficulty achieving 5.1. My receiver is an Onkyo and I am using the "direct" output, meaning it should play exactly as per the source (same as I have for Fios, where 5.1 on HDMI works fine). When I look at the display on the receiver when playing the movie (used Hunger Games to test since I know it is 5.1), rather than showing 3/2.1 as it would for 5.1, it shows "PCM fs 48kHz". Anyone have any clues? I am using an iPhone 4S to play netflix from the app and both the Chromecast and phone have full wifi signal.

I recently found out that Chromecast would support 5.1 audio, I had other devices that would give me the DD+ 5.1 audio on Netflix when Chromecast would only give me 2 channel PCM.

I also have a Media PC in the same system and noticed that the HDMI audio device in the setting was listed as "Panasonic TV" which is what the Sony receiver feeds. It got me to thinking that if the PC sees the audio device as the TV the Chromecast might as well.

Picking through the receiver settings I found there was a setting to pass audio through to the TV in case you wanted to listen on the TV speakers which we never do. Turned that setting off, rebooted everything, and now had DD+ surround from Netflix on the Chromecast. Hope this helps

 

[Brent212]

I know this is an old thread, but in case anyone comes across it with the same problem I was having, the fix was beyond easy and so goddamn stupid that I feel obligated to post it in case it can save at least one person hours of struggling with the countless suggestions out there that don't address the actual problem.

In my netflix account settings, there's a "playback settings" option under profile settings. I had mine set to "low". Not sure why. Maybe it's the default or maybe I set it there at some point to reduce data consumption on my cell phone data plan. Anyway, I set it to "high" and now I have the "dolby digital plus 5.1" audio option.