DTS to AC3 Conversion for 5.1 audio not working.

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TMCThomas
Posts: 2
Joined: Mon Mar 19, 2018 3:15 am

DTS to AC3 Conversion for 5.1 audio not working.

Post by TMCThomas »

Hello everyone!

I Know there have been other topics about this subject and I know there are solutions in those topics but after an hour of trying them all I can't seem to get it to work so here's my problem explained in detail:

First of all even tough I consider myself quite "techy" I'm totally new to all this DLNA and Mediaserver stuff so the solution might be really simple I just don't know about it/how it works.
I'm currently using the following setup: A windows 10 PC with version 6.80 of the universalmediaserver installed with default settings, I've got an app named "Server Cast" found on the play store to cast movies from my PC through DLNA to the Chromecast which is inserted in the HDMI port of my Home cinema set. Now this works fine when a movie has AC3 5.1 surround sound but when a movie has DTS (or DTS-HD) 5.1 sound it only outputs 2.1 I've already discovered that the Chromecast is the problem here since it doens't support DTS due to some licensing issues or something like that. The solution would be for Universal Media Server to convert the DTS sound to AC3 which is apperantly possible but I haven't been able to get it to work yet. Most topics say the following " when "keep DTS track" is unticked, UMS will convert audio to AC3" So I made sure "Keep DTS track" is unticked but it doesn't seem to work. Audio is still only 2.1, I tried some other things aswell but nothing worked so far. Does anyone know what I could possibly be doing wrong? Remember that I'm a total noob on this subject and I might forgot something really silly.

Greetings Thomas Mulder.
Nadahar
Posts: 1990
Joined: Tue Jun 09, 2015 5:57 pm

Re: DTS to AC3 Conversion for 5.1 audio not working.

Post by Nadahar »

UMS makes decisions on what to transcode to based on some configuration files called "renderer configurations". These will tell UMS what the renderer is capable of and not. This is tricky to get right when the "renderer" doesn't support DLNA (as is the case with the Chromecast). UMS will then see the app you're using as the renderer and try to load a configuration matching that, which will never be correct since the app isn't doing the actual playback.

I don't know if this will work better with BubbleUPnP, but I would try using BubbleUPnP as the "controller" instead of "Server cast". The reason is simply that the combination of BubbleUPnP and Chromecast is used a lot, so chances are that UMS' configuration files fit better with this combination. I'll give no guarantees though, to get it right you'd ideally have to modify the BubbleUPnP renderer configuration so that it matches the capabilities of the Chromecast. You would then have potential issues if using BubbleUPnP to play on a different device, but this is all due to the fact that Chromecast doesn't support DLNA and the whole solution is a sort of "workaround" to compensate for that.
TMCThomas
Posts: 2
Joined: Mon Mar 19, 2018 3:15 am

Re: DTS to AC3 Conversion for 5.1 audio not working.

Post by TMCThomas »

Ah ok, Thanks for the explanation! I'm going to try BubbleUPnP to see how that works.
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