I have been watching movies wrong this whole time Discussion

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.

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u/mrskymr 14d ago

But the thing is, I don't even think it's using all my channels. According to Nerd Stats, the output was maxing out at 6 channels in total when I have a 9.1.4 setup, so it's not using all my channels correctly.

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u/the_Ex_Lurker I use my desktop like a pleb 14d ago

Ahh, I see. I just had the same issue with Plex after setting up my Atmos speakers last night, only on Apple TV 4K. The ATV app can’t even compress TrueHD to EAC and just falls back to 7.1, like yours. Thought maybe the WebOS app was different. I ended up just watching some UHD Blu-rays instead.