5.1 surround through amazon firestick

[Mikstrixx]

Just wondering if anyone knew how my amazon fire stick is playing youtube in 5. 1 surround? I thought YouTube couldn't play 5.1, I mean i could be wrong but it doesnt sound like its just playing the 2.1 through the surround. 

[JZStudios]

Youtube is only stereo. It might be matrixing it.

[PlayStation 2]

10 minutes ago, JZStudios said:

Youtube is only stereo. It might be matrixing it.

From what I've seen, YouTube does have proper 5.1 channel audio support and will compress any supported 5.1 channel audio uploaded to the site into a 384kbps AAC audio file for streaming with the video. 

A weird side effect of that is how YouTube downmixes 5.1 channel audio... namely, it shoves the center channel to the left channel and it shoves the subwoofer channel to the right channel. 

[JZStudios]

1 minute ago, handymanshandle said:

From what I've seen, YouTube does have proper 5.1 channel audio support and will compress any supported 5.1 channel audio uploaded to the site into a 384kbps AAC audio file for streaming with the video. 

A weird side effect of that is how YouTube downmixes 5.1 channel audio... namely, it shoves the center channel to the left channel and it shoves the subwoofer channel to the right channel. 

From every time I've looked into it from YT themselves, no, they absolutely do not. They only do stereo. They might downmix a surround stream, but they don't play back at that.

Upon further review, this argument goes back a few years and no one really seems to know. Some say it works, others say no, some say only certain apps, others say those apps don't work.

I can no longer find anything from YT themselves talking about it, which every other streaming provider discloses. For example Hulu recently(ish) started streaming 5.1 on select titles. They made an announcement about it. I have a PS4 and plenty of 5.1 content, but there's seems to be conflicting arguments as to whether or not the PS4 app actually plays back in 5.1, if YT supports it at all.

[PlayStation 2]

1 minute ago, JZStudios said:

From every time I've looked into it from YT themselves, no, they absolutely do not. They only do stereo. They might downmix a surround stream, but they don't play back at that.

Upon further review, this argument goes back a few years and no one really seems to know. Some say it works, others say no, some say only certain apps, others say those apps don't work.

I can no longer find anything from YT themselves talking about it, which every other streaming provider discloses. For example Hulu recently(ish) started streaming 5.1 on select titles. They made an announcement about it. I have a PS4 and plenty of 5.1 content, but there's seems to be conflicting arguments as to whether or not the PS4 app actually plays back in 5.1, if YT supports it at all.

I've never seen a concrete answer on it myself either, but I do know that YouTube does render out dedicated 5.1 channel audio streams.

It's complicated. I don't think there's ever gonna be a straight answer. I do know the way YouTube downmixes multichannel audio is terrible, though.

[JZStudios]

4 minutes ago, handymanshandle said:

I've never seen a concrete answer on it myself either, but I do know that YouTube does render out dedicated 5.1 channel audio streams.

It's complicated. I don't think there's ever gonna be a straight answer. I do know the way YouTube downmixes multichannel audio is terrible, though.

I can upload some 5.1 tests I have and some music I poorly mixed and try it, but it 100% doesn't work on PC browsers. I saw a claim that it works on Chrome, but I'm using Opera, a Chromium, and Firefox and neither does it. If it don't do it on PS4 I'm calling it as a no, since there's no reason it wouldn't work on PS4 if it works at all.

[JZStudios]

Trying to upload a 5.1 .flac file, which YT says it supports, it claims it can't process the video. Might be because it's not actually a video and just audio?

 

I've turned it into a video file through the DAW and it plays back in multichannel through VLC and uploaded it. Both of these are natively multichannel. 100% neither works on Opera nor Firefox. And it 100% doesn't work on PS4. I even went to the Dolby channel and tried their Amaze Atmos video and it's stereo only. I'm going to go ahead and say it's a bust.

 

[Mikstrixx]

It definitely sounds like 5.1. Very odd that there isn't any set information on this! I just found it very odd because it doesn't seem to be playing the same audio out of the rear channels as whats coming out the fromt channels