Apple TV3 Optical

[Deleted User 28523]

Complete newbie at Handbrake, just received my first ever Apple TV. It's the latest one (3).
Output to screen via HDMI ( duh ) and audio connected optical to Onkyo receiver.

Been searching this forum, but could not find a straight answer for this :

I've put an MKV through Handbrake and while it plays perfectly on my MacBook Pro it does not on my ATV.
Picture is fine on both, but I just get stereo on the ATV. When I play it on the MacBook ( using it's optical output to the same Onkyo receiver ) it does give DD 5.1 so the stream is in the file.

Obviously I have some audio settings wrong, can anyone tell me what they should be to get DD 5.1 from the optical output on the Apple TV ?
Or is this just not possible ?

Thanks in advance

[Deleted User 11865]

Activity Log please.

[kiran_mk2]

I've literally just noticed the same thing (I upgraded from ATV1 to ATV3). Sorted the problem by going to Settings->Audio&Video->Dolby Digital->On. Now when a video is played, press and hold play/pause until the menu comes up, then go to audio tab. The AC3 option should now be selectable (unhelpfully, the track names that I had on the ATV1 have all been replaced by the language). On my setup, the AC3 track is the first "English" option despite AC3 being the 2nd track in the file after AAC.

Seems like there's still some things from the ATV2 days that haven't been fixed.

[Flo]

For the Apple TV to output Dolby Digital via SPDIF automatically, you'll need to set AAC 2ch as the primary audio channel and have the AC-3 track right after it.

i.e.

track 1: video
track 2: AAC
track 3: AC-3
track n: anything else

[Deleted User 28523]

Thanks, I will try that ( as soon as I can find the time )

[Deleted User 28523]

Well, as I was looking around I came across a remark stating that the setting for Dolby Digital on the ATV3 had to be set to "ON", not "Automatic".
That did the trick.

Furthermore, there is no need for 2 audiotracks, just the one 5.1 track is enough.
Thanks for the help.

[TedJ]

This is not guaranteed to always work; firmware updates to the ATV1 and ATV2 have broken previously working encodes that only contained an AC3 track or had the track order reversed. I would stick with the AAC/AC3 combination if at all possible... you're only saving a small amount of space by omitting the AAC track anyway.

[Deleted User 11865]

if you really want to save space, you could use the HE-AAC encoder (OS X only) to add a Mono, 32 Kbps track