Home Theater enthusiasts - Shield TV + Kodi supports DTS-HD MA/Dolby-TrueHD

Yet another reason to get a shield. Not only a great device for Tablo, but can also handle high quality bluray rips like a beast. I have this set up with my 4.0 system and its working great. And yes, it also supports HEVC.

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Some day. After dropping money on antenna, tablo, HDD, Modem, router etc, $200 for the shield won’t pass the WAF test.

@jvh4 Wait for a sale. It was $150 on BF with an included $50 remote, and I have seen it drop to $175 with the remote since then.

Also, @Andrroid how do you have a 4.0 system? Fronts and surround, no center or subwoofer?

Yep. The front towers (pioneer SP-FS52s) handle the lows fine. I wanted to avoid a sub as I live in an apartment complex and I don’t really want to disturb people too much - its loud as it is. We pull the towers out to the sides and angle inwards and that seems to compensate well for not having a center. We would need to replace the tv stand to actually fit the pioneer center in there, maybe later this year. The surrounds are fed by a rocketfish receiver/transmitter set up (to avoid having to run wire).

So Kodi has this feature included, is it hardware dependent? Can a Fire TV running Kodi output DTS-HD or TrueHD over HDMI?

Of course, you need an AVR capable of decoding said formats.

Very nice - I have the same tower speakers in one of my TV rooms. They are a great speaker, especially for the price.

Hardware dependent. Kodi is taking advantage of the fact that the shield can do HD audio pass through (as of patch 2.0).

Adds pass-through support for Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio lossless audio

https://shield.nvidia.com/support/nvidia-android-tv/release-notes

I do not know if the Fire TV can do this.

Well if NVIDIA released a firmware update to pass through DTS-HD and TrueHD, that would make me think it’s not hardware dependent but rather software dependent.

Okay, yeah I was more saying that “its possible because the hardware and software of the shield support it.” I don’t know how the Fire TV will handle it.

Yeah I was shocked at how well they balance the audio (since they are handling f/l/center/sub). They do it well, especially when positioned properly.

So I did more looking, the Fire TV boxes are HDMI 1.4 ports which can passthrough DTS-HD and TrueHD. The OS on the Fire TV would need to be updated so add such a feature. Thus it is software dependent.

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Ah yeah, I remember reading about that when I was looking for HDMI cables. As long as its an HDMI 1.4 or above port, its good.

I wonder if Amazon is working on such an update.

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Likely not. The 1st gen box has been out for ages.

Oh well. I’m glad I settled on the shield. These things continue to impress.

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That’s awfully tempting. I got a Roku 4 for Christmas (at my request), so I can’t justify a SHIELD purchase right now. The Roku 4 has been awesome for Plex and Tablo (Sling and WatchESPN are another story). I’m enjoying the HEVC support, as well. My archival workflow has shifted from H264/AC3 5.1 to HEVC/DTS-HD. It’s creating some transcoding work for my Plex server (to my Roku 3s) for the time being…but I’m hoping it will pay dividends down the road as I get more HEVC-capable clients.

I guess I’m still holding out hope that Roku will one day support DTS-HD MA/TrueHD passthrough.

I am very surprised the Roku flagship device doesn’t have this passthrough support especially with it being a 4K device - very disappointing.