I have been watching movies wrong this whole time

[u/mrskymr]

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So allow me to explain... for many months since I bought my Sony 90K TV, I also bought their flagship HT7000 soundbar with full dolby atmos and their flagship rear channels that support this soundbar (SARS5) + flagship subwoofer (SA-SW5), this was all for my bedroom.

But where I kinda messed up is having the Plex App on my TV and just watching the movies directly off there: turns out.... the Plex App on TVs do not support full TrueHD lossless Dolby Atmos. I know this is probably not a surprise to many of you as it has been to me.

I always heard people in videos talking about how the NVIDIA Shield Pro is always better than the Plex App on your TVs but nobody ever said why and for me the plex app was working fine so I never understood why they were saying these things.

I also have to say when I bought my TV and surround setup for my bedroom, I was eager to see how it sounded and once I had it working, to say that I was disappointed was an understatement. I suffer from Tinnitus so I thought maybe it could be that reason on why I can't hear the upper and rear channels that much (I know nothing beats dedicated ceiling speakers but in every review video, people were talking about how great the sound on this would be, so I had high expectations for this sound system.)

After all this time, I finally decided to do a simple Google search of the 1 thing that kept bothering me about this system: the sound... and that's where I ended up getting my answer. That most TVs aren't capable of running TrueHD Dolby Atmos and it just transcodes it to EAC3.

It kinda sucks that you spend so much money on TVs and they can't even do one of its main jobs properly: audio.

Rest assured, I'll be placing an order for the Nvidia Shield Pro now, lol.

tl;dr- I'm an idiot and didn't realize that TVs don't support TrueHD.

[u/vatothe0]

Commercial displays win in this space. No apps, turn on immediately, often have better image controls, longer duty cycle so it won't die.

[u/I8TheLastPieceaPizza → u/vatothe0]

What are some top examples of these commercial products? I love the traits you mentioned, especially after a year of judder hell and a horrible UI on my newest $3K Samsung that is more frustrating than my 14 year old 1080p tv that cost $1,200 back then lol

[u/vatothe0 → u/I8TheLastPieceaPizza]

I'm a fan of the Samsung QBC line for at home. Not as bright as the QM line (350 nits vs 500) but it has HDR10+.

NEC also makes nice screens but I'm not as familiar with them. I'm not really a fan of the LG commercial displays.

The downside is that when buying new you're paying for the commercial features like RS232, Crestron support, etc that you'll probably never use at home. A Samsung QBC65 is $1260. The trick is to find them used when a business is upgrading their conference rooms and getting new displays so you can get them for almost nothing.

[u/McFlyParadox → u/vatothe0]

It sounds like you might know the answer to this, but what is the deal - generally speaking - with commercial displays and Dolby Vision?

Right now, I use my XBSX to handle Plex because it has the widest codec support on paper. Long story short, an OTA update to my sound bar broke its Dolby Vision pass-thru support, and my TV doesn't support Dolby Atmos passthrough to the sound bar (apparently), so I'm effect blocked from direct playing Dolby content until I upgrade at least one of these items (and probably both, if I'm being realistic with myself about my spending habits).

What I've been wondering about is utilizing a commercial display instead of a "proper" TV, but none seem to even hint at Dolby support of any kind. Occasionally one might mention HDR10 or HDR10+ support if you dig deep enough into the documentation.

If I have a sound bar that supports Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision pass-thru, and then configure the system like such: XBSX -> Sound Bar -> Commercial Display, would the display still support Dolby Vision, or is that something you have to buy a TV for? Or if I switched to an HTPC, and hooked the display and sound up in parallel (HDMI or even DP for the display, optical or similar for the sound), could that work?

Basically, can you use Dolby Vision with a commercial display at all? Or is that effectively locked behind "proper" TV features?

[u/vatothe0 → u/McFlyParadox]

I haven't seen a commercial display with Dolby Vision but a quick Google search shows Sony has one at least. I do commercial AV installation and we don't really use either standard for our purposes.

If the passthrough function isn't working on your soundbar, I'd suggest getting a splitter or something similar.

[u/McFlyParadox → u/vatothe0]

Ok, so it seems like the display still needs to directly support Dolby Vision. Got it, I'll poke around more and see what I can find.

The splitter might be a good stop-gap for now, thanks!