# Tivo to Pioneer receiver via HDMI no sound effects



## dpr64 (Aug 26, 2008)

Weird...I get NO sound effects now that I set up the new Pioneer receiver (VSX-824) like I did with my old yamaha which was connected via hdmi and optical cable... The HDMI on the old unit was just a pass through and did not handle any sound, just video which was lame! Had to use optical cable to get the sound.


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

Just like fourteen years ago, any channel with Dolby Digital will not have any sound effects. I'm on FiOS and every channel uses DD audio.
To have sound effects with a DD channel you need to use stereo pcm output from the TiVo.


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## DrewTivo (Mar 30, 2005)

aaronwt said:


> Just like fourteen years ago, any channel with Dolby Digital will not have any sound effects. I'm on FiOS and every channel uses DD audio.
> To have sound effects with a DD channel you need to use stereo pcm output from the TiVo.


BTW, OP you can change this in settings on the Tivo if you want.

Question remains why Tivo hasn't fixed this limitation in all that time - is there no technical way to make the boops DD?


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## JoeKustra (Dec 7, 2012)

aaronwt said:


> Just like fourteen years ago, any channel with Dolby Digital will not have any sound effects. I'm on FiOS and every channel uses DD audio.
> To have sound effects with a DD channel you need to use stereo pcm output from the TiVo.


I can see the explanation text when setting audio, but they should include a warning that using PCM makes the box send 2ch over HDMI. I would rather have 5.1 than a beep when using the remote. You're right, it's a stupid limitation.


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## jseeley (Mar 29, 2011)

JoeKustra said:


> I can see the explanation text when setting audio, but they should include a warning that using PCM makes the box send 2ch over HDMI. I would rather have 5.1 than a beep when using the remote. You're right, it's a stupid limitation.


I'm sure the technical challenge is trivial, it's more likely a royalty cost to encode the 'boops' in DD vs passing the raw stream un-modified...

just my guess...


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

Yeah, likely a royalty issue. 

One thing that they could do, royalty free, is allow the TiVo to be set to output 6ch PCM sound. A lot of new receivers support 6ch PCM so they could output that without losing surround sound and it's free, and easy, to insert sound effects into a PCM stream.


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## Arcady (Oct 14, 2004)

I turned off the TiVo noises over a year ago. You get used to an interface without stupid sound effects eventually. They dropped the silly noises in Mac OS back in the 90's. Apparently nobody at Microsoft or TiVo figured out we are not in an episode of CSI, and we don't need our devices to make beeps and boops constantly. I set up a new Mini last month and that was the first time I heard the TiVo noises in a long while.

Now they just need to start shipping smartphones with the keyboard click noise turned off by default. People who sit in the airport making clicking noises, and woosh and bing! and other annoying sounds need their phones to be silent.


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

Dan203 said:


> Yeah, likely a royalty issue.
> 
> One thing that they could do, royalty free, is allow the TiVo to be set to output 6ch PCM sound. A lot of new receivers support 6ch PCM so they could output that without losing surround sound and it's free, and easy, to insert sound effects into a PCM stream.


It isn't free.
To do that they would still need to pay Dolby for a license to decode multichannel dd and output it as multichannel PCM. Many BD players don't do this with DD codecs because they don't want to pay extra for the license. I would think TiVo is no different. They only send out stereo PCM from multichannel DD to avoid the extra cost. Plus with the TiVo to add sounds it would first need to decode , mix in the sounds and then re-encode back to DD. Which is an added cost which really isn't needed.


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

The decoder license is a single fee regardless of channels. Well at leats for standard DD. Once you get into DD+ it's different, which could be why BD players don't do it. But there is a single license for standard DD decoding whether it's 2ch or 6ch, which they obviously already pay for since they are able to decode 5.1 and convert to 2ch PCM. Encoding is another story. The 5.1 enocder is more expensive then the 2.0 encoder. And all DD encoding is expensive, and complex due to the rules imposed by Dolby about certification. (I have first hand experince with licensing DD codecs)

That PCM setting in the TiVo has been around since the S2 units with DVD players in them came out. Those had optical outputs, which does not support 6ch PCM audio, so it make sense that they wouldn't decode to 6ch. In fact that could be why they haven't added multichannel PCM as an option, because it would only work via HDMI and TiVos still have an optical port that they have to account for.


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## JoeKustra (Dec 7, 2012)

Dan203 said:


> The decoder license is a single fee regardless of channels. Well at leats for standard DD. Once you get into DD+ it's different, which could be why BD players don't do it. But there is a single license for standard DD decoding whether it's 2ch or 6ch, which they obviously already pay for since they are able to decode 5.1 and convert to 2ch PCM. Encoding is another story. The 5.1 enocder is more expensive then the 2.0 encoder. And all DD encoding is expensive, and complex due to the rules imposed by Dolby about certification. (I have first hand experince with licensing DD codecs)
> 
> That PCM setting in the TiVo has been around since the S2 units with DVD players in them came out. Those had optical outputs, which does not support 6ch PCM audio, so it make sense that they wouldn't decode to 6ch. In fact that could be why they haven't added multichannel PCM as an option, because it would only work via HDMI and TiVos still have an optical port that they have to account for.


That all makes sense. I find it curious that with the noise enabled, it is disabled only with the HD menus and works with the SD menus. On a Mini it works in TiVo Central since there is no video window, but not when the video window or live audio is present.


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## Diana Collins (Aug 21, 2002)

JoeKustra said:


> That all makes sense. I find it curious that with the noise enabled, it is disabled only with the HD menus and works with the SD menus. On a Mini it works in TiVo Central since there is no video window, but not when the video window or live audio is present.


If you watch your AV receiver (and it has a DD indicator, but I think most do) you'll see that when you go into any menu that doesn't support video in a window the audio output switches to 2 ch. stereo. When you go to any screen that displays video it switches back to DD output.


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