TVs

[Silversong]

Thanks Thad, and thanks for the thought, Mongrel. I'll do some more digging.

beat, no streaming services. She has never owned a computer and does not have internet, only TV and satellite. Might just be satellite now.

Also, there's nothing actually wrong with her current TV, except it's pretty old. And I've noticed that for some reason TV shows tend to be cropped weird around the edges.

[hngkong]

Could it be that it's zoomed in?

[Brantly B.]

Her TV probably still has overscan adjustment turned on. New media tends to not respect the overscan area anymore since that hasn't been a relevant thing since before today's ADs were born, but it's still a default on most television displays. If we're not talking about an actual CRT then you can probably find an option to make it stop doing that, somewhere.

[Thad]

So it turns out that if I connect PC -> audio receiver -> TV I don't get VRR, and if I connect PC -> TV -> audio receiver I don't get surround sound. So I'm back to needing two separate cables, one from the PC to the TV and the other from the PC to the receiver.

eARC is supposed to solve this problem but lol eARC passthrough doesn't work on Samsung TVs.

It's not really a significant inconvenience for my use case since I only have one device that supports VRR anyway, and I don't expect I'll be buying any current-gen consoles any time soon. But it's still pretty irritating to see a support ticket for this issue going back years and Samsung apparently ignoring it.

An update to this: I can't speak to the problem the people on that ticket are having, but passthrough on my TV does work, provided I use a program that can output audio in a supported bitstream format. I found an article titled Getting DTS 5.1+ sound via S/PDIF or HDMI using PulseAudio that walked me through it; it targets Gentoo so it's not a 1:1 match for my system, but I'm able to get surround sound from Kodi this way.

Unfortunately so far I've only been able to get it to work with Kodi. Basically what I've got right now is, if I've got a video with surround sound encoded into some kind of bitstream format, Kodi can output the bitstream directly to the TV without decoding it, the TV can output it directly to the receiver without decoding it, and then the receiver can decode it.

The problem is for programs that don't output audio as a bitstream. Games, my browser, etc. There should be a way to convert all my audio to a compressed bitstream format before outputting it, but I haven't had any luck with it yet; there's an app called dcaenc for that purpose but it's no longer updated and while it seems to work with S/PDIF out, it just gives me a high-pitched whine if I set it on my HDMI audio output.

All this is a little over my head but at least it means it should be possible to get surround sound without having to use two different outputs.