Just wondering what the state of Headphone surround virtualization is for CE?
Windows/Xbox has “DTS unbound” and “Dolby Access” app which work via DirectSound to get there respective “Dolby for headphones”, “DTS Headphone:X” working.
Especially the Dolby variant is pretty good, compared to any other variant i tested for TV use.
Than there is hesuvi and spatial-sound-card.
So is there any plugin/setup that can work with CE on a Ugoos device?
PS: I guess my old hardware based gamedac should work via spdif, yet it only uses the old DTS Headphone v1 variant.
Very good point.
I’m also interested in this option (if feasible/available) for CE.
I’ve got Spatial Sound Card installed on my HTPC and it works great.
Just finished setting-up my new Ugoos 6B+ with Jellyfin and since Kodi supports realtime AC3 encoding, i can use my Steelseries GameDac v1 in PS4 mode.
In this mode the device supports 2.0 audio as a normal USB-Dac and spdif AC3 input for 5.1 surround. Than you can enable the DTS “headphone” mode on the DAC and get decent virtual-surround via HRTF. While its not the newer DTS:X v2, its better than Kodi’s default audi-matrix down-mixing option.
So basically i get 2.0 audio directly via usb, 5.1 AC3 as pass-through and everything else is live transcoded to 5.1 AC3.
This is a huge advantage compared to my old Zidoo setup, which needs to trigger Jellyfin audio transcode on the server, which than also prevents seeking (internal zidoo player issue for http/segmented streams) and has other issues. In Kodi + CE this works perfectly, without needing to trigger a transcode on the JF-server.
Other than this, i still could not find any updated and affordable AVR/DAC’s that have the newer DTS:X v2 or Atmos Headphones via hardware, those technologies are exclusive to PC/Xbox atm.
Since USB audio works in Kodi/CE a DAC that is Linux compatible and reports virtual 7.1 PCM capabilities should also work, so Kodi can just send a 7.1 pcm-stream via USB.
Yet i could not find any headphone DAC that supports this and all other AVR mainly use DTS:NEO 6 or some simple/unspecified “virtual surround” mode for headphones.