Does AirPlay support 5.1 surround sound for the AppleTV ???

I'm missing something here.

You want to Airplay from a device to AppleTV2.

To begin with I don't think Airplay supports 5.1 from iOS device to AppleTV but have never tried.

Secondly how would Airplay from iOS device to AppleTV make your speakers wireless? Or are you wanting to send video to the TV and separately audio over Airplay to 5.1 speakers (which i don't believe is currently possible))?

Yes, that's what I thought you meant.

Delivering the audio wirelessly to rear speakers should really be a feature of your AV amp/receiver not the AppleTV or any iOS device delivering the audio.

Currently as far as I know Airport/Airplay audio is stereo only (I may be wrong), but unless there were an Airplay compatible 5.1 capable surround system specifically designed to work in teh way you intend you would need an amp based solution currently.

If you were using AppleTV to show 5.1 encoded video (not all is) streamed from iTunes locally or the internet, then any 5.1 could be delivered to the amp from the AppleTV over a single optical cable.

These things are always evolving and I would not be surprised if we saw this kind of device one day.

AC

Even if Airplay supported 5.1 to an Airplay AV amp, I would imagine it would send all channels together to the amp and rely on that to transmit to individual speakers.

AC

I had same issue. My issue was my surround system was not connected to Apple TV. I had TV volume turned off because I preferred using surround speakers. Turned up volume on TV and got sound. Unfortuantely, I have a TV with speakers in rear so it sounds awful. I will have to get Airplay speakers.

I have spent hours trying to solve this for myself, and haven't been able to get any 5.1 audio to stream from iTunes over AirPlay to Apple TV 3. As far as I can tell, it just won't work.

I've created 5.1 audio mixes as h.264, WAV, AIFF, etc. The only surround audio files that I can reliably get iTunes to import are "movies" (h.264 with empty video tracks) that contain 5.1 audio. These will play back from iTunes, but when streamed wirelessly to my Apple TV over AirPlay, only the front two speakers will play. Unfortunately I don't have a Mac directly connected to my stereo to see if a direct digital connection would work.

Since I've double-checked my exported sound files and validated that the LFE and rear speaker channels do contain content, the only conclusion I can manage is that while AppleTV does support 5.1 when streamed from Apple or Netflix, it does not support 5.1 when streamed from iTunes because AirPlay doesn't stream anything other than the front two channels.

I have 5.1 audio working over Airplay, both from iTunes as from an iOS device.

The trick is that a video file has to have two audio channels

- first with 2 channel audio

- second with 5.1 channel audio

On the Apple TV set Dolby Digital to "On" (instead of automatic).

@lexvo

That's very helpful, thanks. What video format did you use, and what app did you use to do the conversion?

Well, to follow on again, I just cannot get ATV to play 5.1 for multichannel audio (DVD-A converted to h.264 .mp4) unless I use Beamer (app).

I created .mp4 containing 2 channel audio and a secondary track with 5.1 audio (as described above) using aac passthru for the 5.1 channels. Beamer lets me choose to send the 5.1 track over AirPlay, and ATV plays it in 5.1. My receiver sees this as Dolby Digital. However, when I load the same .mp4 into iTunes and stream over AirPlay, it plays in stereo every time.

If I remove the stereo audio track so there's only the 5.1, the same thing happens: Beamer streams it in 5.1, but iTunes only plays it in stereo.

This is driving me crazy. Any more ideas?

For conversions I am using Handbrake. I use the standard ATV3 preset.

Are you sure you have set Dolby Digital on the ATV to On?

Here are some good articles where conversion for 5.1 is mentioned:

http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/articles/comments/beginners-guide-to-converting -videos-for-apple-tv-ios/

http://www.maclife.com/article/howtos/how_encode_pro_handbrake

Continued thanks, Lexvo.

I do have Dolby Digital turned on with my Apple TV (thanks for the pointer).

I have finally managed to get a "video" file containing my audio to play over AirPlay in 5.1. It was a total pain: had to create a .AC3 5.1 file using Audacity, and then re-mux it into the video file that contained an empty video track and a .AAC file. [If I were converting a video file that already had a .ac3 track, then presumably Handbrake would have made this simple as you pointed out]

This technically works, though since the result is a video file it's not exactly usable for an album's worth of music (perhaps I could may Playlists containing all the videos in an album, but it just gets more and more painful).

So these tips will certainly help when I want to convert MOVIES such that I get 5.1 audio (as you note, the trick is to have two audio channels, the first being AAC (whether stereo or Dolby Pro Logic II) and the second being 5.1 channel AC3.

I still haven't found any *audio* format that I can create and which iTunes will import, such that it plays back over AirPlay in 5.1 surround.

[There are audio formats that'll hold 5.1, but I can't get iTunes to import them, or I can import them but iTunes will only stream them in stereo]

Sorry, I hadn't noticed you were talking about pure audio files 🙂

I only use 5.1 for video and listen music in standard stereo.

I don't know if iTunes/ATV officially supports pure 5.1 audio. Would be a good thing if it could of course.