Panasonic TX-58HX800b play USB audio through AV receiver?

[reubenno]

Hello all,
I'm looking at getting an AV receiver to upgrade my audio to 5.1 on my Panasonic TX-58HX800b.

I was wondering if it's possible to play back videos through USB in the TV, and use the HDMI Arc port on the TV to run the audio from the USB video out to an AV receiver.

I know that the TV only supports AC3 and AAC so I wouldn't be able to play Lossless audio, but does anybody have any experience trying this?

Thank you very much.

 

[mikej]

Yes - if you can get ARC to work then you should get the sound (in some form) from anything you can play on the TV on your surround system. According to the handy chart on this page, you'll be limited to 'compressed 5.1' audio with ARC so I think the two you mention should be covered as they are older, 'lossy' audio formats ?

One issue you might face though is whether the TV's media player will play and decode both the video and sound from your files in the first place, although this is normally caused with trying to play newer formats/codecs on an older TV. If you're trying to play older formats on a newer TV I would think you stand a better chance at success, provided the formats are fairly standard and not too obscure. Have you already been playing the files you're talking about successfully ?

If you did have files with lossless audio, then one way round this is to use some kind of media streaming device and connect this directly to the AVR via HDMI, which gets around the ARC audio limitations. This is the preferred method for many, as a good streaming device will generally support more formats and should get more updates than the TV's own media player, which can get outdated over time.

I've personally never had an issue with ARC, but it's worth noting that many people struggle to get it to work properly. It seems that just because a TV and AVR are both ARC enabled, that doesn't necessarily guarantee success !

 

[bingodisco]

I output the audio from my GX800 via optical cable to my Pioneer AVR. This gives me 5.1 for Netflix, Amazon, Rakuten, etc. and also from video files played back from a USB drive connected to USB port 1. I did try using ARC but found I occasionally ran into a few lip-sync issues with some apps, with optical it's spot on and suits my needs perfectly.

I also now route all my devices (Sky Q, 4K Blu-Ray player & Firestick 4K) through the AVR first and have the one HDMI output from the AVR to the TV which passes through the video signal. This has proved very successful in terms of lip-sync and audio format compatibility, so I actually use the optical output from the TV quite rarely.

My 4K Blu-Ray player has a USB port and I tend to play video files from USB drive attached to it rather than the TV as again the media player has more format compatibility.