HD Audio Pass Through on Mac Mini HDMI port

Hello, no expert on this, but I think I read that either OSX or sound chipset was limited to 96 KHz 2 channel, but from solving a couple of problems here I'm led to surmise the actual rate/quality might divide whatever top rate is has, by the number of channels.

As I say, no expert, mostly speculation, facts are hard to find anymore it seems.

Hopefully you get an expert in here to reply. 🙂

I have seen articles saying that a Mac mini running Windows 7 via Boot Camp has been able to output HD audio like e.g. Dolby True HD. However I have seen nothing convincing about this being done successully under OS X.

The conclusion is that the hardware is willing but the software is weak. 🙂

If you check the XBMC forums you will find that that, for some

reason, OSX prevents the passthrough of the HD audio formats

(TrueHD, DTS-MA). There are also only a few video chip sets

that allow the pass through feature. It seems that XBMC does

have an experimental decoder for TrueHD.

Another oddity of OSX, is that even over HDMI, audio seems

to be limited to 96kHz. However, even my 2010 Mini when booted

via bootcamp into Windows7 will allow PowerDVD (use that for

viewing BluRays) do decode the HD tracks and transfer the full

192kHz, 24 bit, 7.1 PCM data over HDMI. So, even though Apple

claims the capability (which the hardware in fact has), it seems

the OS blocks/limits it.

On computers anyway, passthrough of the HD audio is problematic

because of the required "protected" audio path that is required.

grahamhighdefaudio wrote:

ok thanks to all. so it seems nothing has yet changed on the osx front. Looks very much like its going to be a windows box solution which is a shame as in all other respects the mac mini is ideal.

I did mention the Mac mini can do this in Windows under Boot Camp 🙂

I know this thread is a little old now, but I've been wondering the same thing myself - so I googled it and came up with this thread.

I've just bought a new 7.1 Amp, the Yamaha RXV677 from Richer Sounds. It handles DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1 and Dolby TrueHD 7.1. Up until now I've not been able to try this sound format out as my current 2009 Mac Mini only sends audio through the Optical Out, so the best I can get is Dolby Digital 5.1 pass thru via S/PDIF. I was quite happy with this arrangement, until I get around to buying a blu-ray player. However, I realised my work laptop is a 2014 MacBook Pro with HDMI out. Therefore out of curiosity I decided to download a couple of HD demos from demo-world.eu that have DTS-HD MA 7.1 audio tracks embedded in them. I tried opening them up in VLC media player (version 2.1.5) and hooked up my 2014 MacBook Pro via HDMI to my Amp. To my amazement it worked!! - I got glorious 7.1 DTS-MA into my Amp, and it sounded simply stunning!! In VLC I had two HDMI audio devices to choose from 'HDMI' and 'Encoded HDMI' (or something like that - I'll have to hook it up again to be sure). When using straight HDMI output, my Amp read it as 'PCM Audio' but when using 'Encoded HDMI' it read it as 7.1 DTS Audio giving the sample rate and bit rate. I need to spend a bit more time testing this out - but it definitely works, and it definitely plays in surround from all my available speakers (I have a 5.1 setup, so can't test the other 2 surround channels).

I have no reason to believe that this will not work from a current Mac Mini with HDMI - although as yet I can't verify this, and I have only tested using VLC player with a .m2ts file.

Thank you for this report it does sound encouraging especially as many other packages use the same software libraries as VLC. Would you be able to try the same test using Kodi? Kodi was formerly called XBMC. See http://kodi.tv/

Kodi has like VLC the ability to play Blu-Ray media but unlike currently VLC Kodi has some ability to also use the Blu-Ray disc menu. (This requires having a full copy of the Blu-Ray disc rather than just a m2ts file.)

Yeah sure I'll give this a go when I get a moment. - I'll report back here my findings. I've been deliberating whether to ditch my Mac Mini setup and go for a Blu-ray player instead or upgrade it if I can achieve a setup I'm satisfied with. I must admit, I'm losing the will to live with playing content through iTunes.

I can’t confirm this: just tried again with VLC 2.2.1 and my amp only sees DTS96/24 instead of DTS-HD MA from the file. So I guess it’s the best it can do with the DTS Core part of the DTS-HD MA audio stream.

Using HDMI with “encoded output” option.

What midi config did you use? 8 channel?