I turned on 5.1 and noticed something frustrating.
Prob1 The thumbnails of a recorded show when you fast forward do not sync with what I am watching.
Prob2 I have a high end surround system powered by a Denon receiver. I enjoy listening to 7.1 surround discs. It’s almost as good as going to a theater.
I do not hear much difference when the Tablo 5.1 is turned on. I seems a little fuller but I don’t hear the distinct channel separation. When listening to a broadcast on the TV(also connecdted to the Denon not Tablo/Roku) I get great separation of the audio channels and great sound quality.
[Edit] My Tablo 2-tuner does just fine recording 5.1 (ac3). The web player (at least through Firefox for live tv) doesn’t transcode. I probably should have known that.
But a recording came through just fine and played through VLC without a hitch.
Same thing with my Android One Moto x4 - with 5.1 enabled, I cannot get sound. So, I disabled it and will try again later after their next release to see if they’ve figure out how to get around that.
On my Android cell, I get no sound at all. And, on all my Firebox tbs, I get choppy playback and stalled image. Meaning, the image freezes but the done continues. How are you folks shutting surround off? I can’t find thst in the settings.
Thank you, @snowcat. It’s pretty typical of Tablo to release an unfinished “upgrade” , and not to have all the pieces on place. In this case, no in-app toggle.
Excited to see 5.1 finally announced… Unfortunately though, I have one of my TV’s that isn’t 5.1 compatiple… I had hoped the Roku 3 would be able to take the 5.1 and mix it down to stereo output for the TV to use… but alas, no… When set to stereo, the Tablo can’t even load the stream… if I set the Roku to DD… it gives a loud sound, then loads the video but no audio…
I did see the Dolby Digital stream working on my Roku 4 though… so, I see that is works…
Since we know the Table has been able to mix DD to stereo since its inception, I guess I wonder why there isn’t an option for the Tablo to mix down to stereo during playback…
But, glad its out there… the Stereo only TV in question, fortunately, has had discussion of replacing it for a while… so there may be a way to justify just getting a new one that can handle DD…
As the blog post promised, Chrome seems incapable of playing 5.1 audio. However, it works fine as long as you set “Remote Streaming Quality” to anything other than “Full Quality”. If you can live with 4Mbps, you’ll get audio.
I guess when Tablo transcodes video it also downsamples audio to Stereo?
I found the place to disable the surrounding sound, and now the Android app works, and no more choppy video when watching live TV on all my devices. Whew, that was a close one.
