Force HDMI to carry 5.1 Dolby or whatever

sdowney717 said:

The Nvidia card has a display port to HDMI adapter, which I use to connect to the HDMI audio extractor which sends the HDMI on to the HDTV.

But all the sound it ever gets is stereo.
I plug a fireTV stick into the HDMI splitter and I get 5.1 Dolby out of the sound coaxial port on both the splitter and the HDTV, so the hardware works.

It is pretty neat the Nvidia driver refuses to pass any 5.1 sound to the HDTV, that really is a wonderful thing! Since the Nvidia driver is sensing the HDTV cant play 5.1 on it's speakers it refuses to send anything but stereo, even though the HDTV can pass 5.1 dolby or LPCM out ots coax to the AV receiver.

If anyone knows of a working way to force or spoof Nvidia driver EDID monitoring please let me know.
This here below did not work.
Custom Resolution Utility (CRU)

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I did huge amount of google searching and may have found a solution on the nvidia forum. I will find out tomorrow and post back what happens. What Nvidia has done here is deliberate so it requires making a new driver inf file for the monitor that tells the nvidia driver it has a certain sound capability.

I could imagine anything from dumb and dumber for the reasons it does this, to marketing agreements and sales for new AV receivers and HDTV with ARC as another where the old hardware gets abandoned in the interest of forcing people to spend more money to get surround sound by making them but new equipment.

Another could be due to this big push for people to buy these small streaming devices versus using a traditional HTPC, which MS seems to be not too interested in anymore either with them abandoning WMC as evidence of that.
And my small FIRETV stick works fine with DD 5.1 sound being outputted to the AV receiver, further evidence they want people to not be using HTPC anymore..

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Got it working. I have surround dolby digital 5.1 in Netflix app and WMC which I run in windows 10.
You have to follow the guide here
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce...idia-cards-th/

Your modifying the monitor driver file to include multichannel sound like 5.1 or whatever you want.
After you install the driver you changed.
You open up sound properties, select Nvidia sound output, set it to default, the sound test there still plays a stereo sound
Then I went to sounds, manage sound devices, and set apps to use the nvidia sound so it can work, my display port to HDMI adapter must be passive adapter. (my video card has a display port output and a DVI output)
The CRU instructions never mentioned installing a modified driver, so I suppose the nvidia driver never thought the HDTV could do anything except stereo.
I dont have surround working in the youtube videos, so will look into it some more.

Links to downloads
EnTech Taiwan | Utilities | Monitor Asset Manager
AW EDID Editor | Analog Way

The audio data is in the CE part of AW EDID Editor. I added LPCM 6 channel and AC3 6 channel (DD5.1)

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YouTube

Youtube does not play 5.1 sounds, only the 3 front speakers. I did verify that myself, and any sound flags are deprecated, meaning they dont work.

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showing westinghouse HDTV now lists DD sound capable.
edit, uploading the inf file

Replying just so I can see the attachment cause apparently you need to do that.

Thank you! I had been dealing with an almost identical issue (though with Intel graphics) and had tried all kinds of solutions but generally couldn't get an EDID override to work correctly until using the method you recommended. Also totally agree about the frustrations with Microsoft, graphics card manufacturers, etc. and their willingness to totally ignore this and similar issues. It's incredibly annoying when you know your hardware can do something but an arbitrary software limit is stopping it.

One thing to add, at least with Intel graphics, once you have the .bin file created by AW EDID Editor, you can use CRU (from your original post) to create an .exe that installs the override without needing to deal with disabling driver signing*. So the steps I used were:

1. Use MonInfo to save the monitor info as a .bin file
2. Open the .bin file in Analog Way EDID Editor. Edit the audio formats, number of speakers, placement, etc. (add CEA extension if necessary) and save the .bin file.
3. Open (Import) the new .bin file in CRU (Custom Resolution Utility). (It should show the extension blocks with audio info inside if you click edit at the bottom.) Then export (change format to .exe) and it will create an installer for the EDID override without any driver signing issues.

I used MonInfo 2.91.0.1043, AW EDID Editor 2.00.13 and CRU 1.4.2.

(*Your graphics driver may need to support EDID overrides in some capacity for this to work; I believe this feature was recently added to the Intel UHD 630 drivers. If I get a chance I'll try it on my GTX 970 and see what happens.)

amcmahon01 said:

GTX 970

I actually didn't have any joy getting this working on my Nvidia card the way as described in the OP. I was connecting my graphics card to my TV then passing audio through ARC. In the advanced page of the speaker properties I needed to have "Dolby Digital" set as the default format, and the only way to enable that was found Making Audio Enhancers Work on Windows | TechPowerUp Forums - this also enables Dolby Digital Live (although you don't see it) which will take any 5.1 sounds and wrap them in Dolby Digital so the TV can understand them.

I will say that this actually is not great as Samsung (and I assume some others like LG) process the sound on the TV rather than pass it straight through to the soundbar. This ended up with a 100ms audio delay, which is no use for gaming. My soundbar has HDMI passthrough for video and I've eventually got that set up almost perfectly, although that came with it's own set up issues which I've posted about over here Lip sync on Q90R with 5.1 input - Page 27 - Samsung Community

AddRAM said:

What exactly are you sending through the card, as in what media ?

Me? Games, films, YouTube. Anything you can play on a PC from stereo to 5.1

amcmahon01 said:

So the steps I used were:

1. Use MonInfo to save the monitor info as a .bin file
2. Open the .bin file in Analog Way EDID Editor. Edit the audio formats, number of speakers, placement, etc. (add CEA extension if necessary) and save the .bin file.
3. Open (Import) the new .bin file in CRU (Custom Resolution Utility). (It should show the extension blocks with audio info inside if you click edit at the bottom.) Then export (change format to .exe) and it will create an installer for the EDID override without any driver signing issues.

I used MonInfo 2.91.0.1043, AW EDID Editor 2.00.13 and CRU 1.4.2.

(*Your graphics driver may need to support EDID overrides in some capacity for this to work; I believe this feature was recently added to the Intel UHD 630 drivers. If I get a chance I'll try it on my GTX 970 and see what happens.)

Since CRU can read the active monitor info (like MonInfo) and edit the EDID (like AW EDID Editor), why are those tools needed? Can the entire process be done with CRU?

I'm also replying to this thread to get the attachments.

My sound system is a Samsung HW-Q67CT. Its basically a 5.1 soundbar that links to a wireless set of rear speakers. They advertise it as a 7.1 system (which I'm learning is kinda BS). It can handle Dolby Digital through the TV but only PCM when playing from the PC. Also, it won't let me pick 5.1 in my "speaker setup" settings.

I have a gtx 1070 with an HDMI plugged in through the HDMI input of my soundbar. And then I got an HDMI plugged from my soundbar's ARC output to my TV's ARC input.

My TV is a samsung Q6DR TV. It plays everything through the smart TV apps just fine. Amazon prime, netflix, even movies that I play on the TV's media player via its USB drive play dolby digital and surround sound. But when I play the same content through my pc doesnt play each channel correctly. I get this "virtual surround sound" coming from each speaker.

Hopefully I can use these guides to help. I'll let you guys know how it goes.

drewnickel said:

I'll let you guys know how it goes.

The reason my PC is connected to my soundbar rather than my TV is because of the audio delay using ARC. Your TV and Soundbar are much newer than mine so they may have been updated to support eARC. I'm sure the notification on the soundbar will say "eARC" when it's activated - it's allows higher res audio than the older ARC and apparently there's no audio delay.

I recently reformatted my computer and managed to get my 5.1 working again super quickly. Basically, I installed the full normal NVIDIA drivers. Then disable driver signature enforcement to install modded audio driver only. Reboot then install the APO driver and set that up . Next, install the Dolby app. Finally, go into sound control panel and set Dolby Digital in the advanced tab. Whole thing took 5 minutes.

If you want to do it this way (the way in the OP never worked for me at all) I've uploaded the modded audio driver, APO driver, and Dolby app here. That Dolby app is specific for 5.1 audio - I looked on the Samsung website and do not understand how it can be a 7.1 system but only support Dolby Digital and DTS digital. Seems like 2 extra speakers that do nothing!