My Home Theater Setup 5.1.2 with Shield and Kodi
TL;DR – these are my “successful” settings for my home theater.
I’m posting this because I spent a month honing my setup to get good home theater results. Although it’s pretty long odds that someone has the same setup that I do, someone might find something useful.
My specific issues were:
· Could not get reliable Dobly / ATMOS / DTS playback across multiple inputs. I’d either get PCM or my receiver would “hunt” for a signal to decode.
· My video would “twitch” every few seconds, especially with 4K video.
· I’d get long audio delays after pausing playback.
· My TV would often not find a signal, requiring system reboots.
· The Voice track was often very muddy requiring subtitles.
A shoutout to everyone else who posted here and helped me with my journey – y’all are great help.
My Setup:
Receiver - Yamaha RX-V6A with 5.1.2 speaker setup (not perfect, but pretty close)
Speakers are all Polk in wall RCi series, and a Klipsch subwoofer
Nvidia Shield (2019) running Kodi, Netflix, Apple TV
Xfinity Xi6-A cable TV box
Samsung Blu-ray player
Synology NAS
Samsung 65” UN65RU8000FXZA connected to my receiver with 30’ optical HDMI cable
Everything is connected by 1GB internet
I’m controlling it all with a Harmony Hub (yup – still working), but CEC/eARC fought me all the way.
My room is very sub-optimal – 10’ ceilings and open floorplan (very uneven every way you look at it).
Receiver settings: Who knew! I spent a LOT of time learning about this with the help of Gemini. Sometimes down the wrong rabbit hole, but I think I got there. Firstly, do the full 8 position YPAO setup – 3 measurements across the primary listening position, 1 behind, 2 in front, and 1 each to the left and right of the primary.
The receiver has a Web Setup in addition to an on-screen setup. The web setup is much easier to manage, so I’ll talk to the following tabs and the items I changed on each.
General: DSP Program – Standard (I don’t use any sound fields now); Dialogue Level and Lift - +2 or 3; Tone Control – Auto
Speaker: Configure all speakers to be small with the exception of the sub. I also raised the cross over to 90Hz on my left and right fronts, and 100Hz on my center. This improved the voice clarity quite a bit. I also raised the equalizer gain for voice just a tad across the front speakers.
Sound: Adaptive DSP Level and Dolby Speaker Virtualization are both on
DSP: Surround Decoder - Decoder Type is set to Auto.
Video/HDMI: HDMI Control: Control – On; Standby Through – On; ARC – On; Standby Sync – Auto; 4K Upscaling – Off; HDMI Video Format – 4K Mode 1
TV Setup: I’ve turned off as much of the “enhancements” as possible. For whatever reason, the HDMI handshake is very sensitive.
Shield Setup:
Display and Sound: Resolution is set to 4K 59.940Hz; AI upscaling is set to
Match Content audio resolution and Match Dolby?PCM audio levels – off; Play comfort noise on HDMI – on; On Available formats, I selected manual and then turned on all formats that my receiver is capable of. HDMI-CEC Enable is off.
Kodi Setup (Expert Mode):
Video Files – mounted using SMB (this worked better than NFS for me)
Playback:
Adjust display refresh rate – off; Adjust display HDR mode – on; Sync playback to display – off; Render method – auto detect; Allow both hardware accelerations; Allowed HDR dynamic metadata formats – Dolby Vision, HDR10+
System Settings:
Display: Resolution – 3840x2160p; Refresh rate – 59.94; Delay after change of refresh rate – 2.0 seconds.
Audio: Audio output device – AudioTrack (IEC), Kodi packer; Number of channels 7.1; Output Configuration – Optimized; Stereo Upmix – off; Allow passthrough – on; Select all receiver capabilities that fit.
That’s pretty much all of it. Comments / suggestions welcome.