The lack of audio passthrough has been so frustrating. Apple TV would be an instant buy for me if it did. I have a pretty good 5.1 setup at home. I've been watching the LoTR trilogy with my kids and there is a big difference between DD 5.1 vs the higher quality audio streams. I use a Shield for this reason, but it's clunky and I'd much rather have something that just works. Shame that Apple has no interest in supporting audio passthrough for their devices.

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safeimp 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This is where I'm at too, really wish Apple supported passthrough. The Shield continues to work but it's a bit sluggish now and needs a new gen.

There are comparable devices like Ugoos (am6b+ with coreelec) and Zidoo but they're a little sketch compared to the aforementioned...

	▲	_coveredInBees 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, exactly. I've looked into those boxes but have steered clear for the same reasons. For now I use ProjectIvy launcher for a very clean launcher experience and I used a custom Shield script someone had posted on Reddit a while back to remove a lot of Google bloat and the Google launcher. Works well enough, but frame-rate matching still requires manual intervention (I have a button mapped to forcing it) and the Apple TV app isn't quite as smooth in playback as it should be on the Shield.

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yesb 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It has the ability to decode the audio on the device and output LPCM if the playback app used supports it. The only thing you can't get is the spatial height channels from formats other than DD+ w/Atmos.