Getting a 360 to output 5.1 over HDMI

Viper87227

Fully [H]
Joined
Jun 2, 2004
Messages
18,017
Someone tell me why I can't figure this out!

I'm redoing my entire home theater for the holiday. I previously had a launch 360 that was outputting component + optical to an older Sony receiver. I had no problems getting DD5.1 to work with this setup. Yesterday my new 360 arrived along with a new Sony STRDH720 receiver. I'm having nothing but headaches getting audio from the 360. Strangely enough, the first time I hooked it up, it showed DD5.1 just fine. Next time I booted up though, with nothing changed, it was outputting 2 channel PCM. I fought with it all night, and it stayed PCM all night. Today I decided to try to see if using optical for audio would fix it. I set things properly in my receiver for that HDMI input to accept audio over optical. Booted up, and huzzah, DD5.1. But then, for shits, I decided to see what would happen if I unplugged the optical (while everything was still on). Well, it still worked. It was still 5.1, only HDMI. I don't think it was ever using the optical. Rebooted the 360, right back to PCM. So again I hooked up the optical to see if that did anything. This time, no change, still PCM. So I shut it all back off and unhooked the optical, because I really don't want the extra wire, especially if it's not doing anything. Powered it all back on, and this time it's outputting sound to my TV, not my receiver. I made sure my receiver was no longer set to accept optical audio for that HDMI. I also turned off audio passthrough to the TV. As expected, that fixed my problem of the TV playing audio... but now I've got no sound at all.

I've been googleing frantically reading everything I can find.... but no solid solution. The fact that the audio being output by the xbox keeps changing is really getting irritating though. Everything else hooked up to the receiver is outputting audio just as it should, I've got no problems getting DTS-HD and TrueHD from my blu-ray player... so I really don't think it's a setting in my receiver that needs to be adjusted.
 
And of course after all that I think I got it. Setting my receiver to look for audio on optical even though I'm only using HDMI somehow made everything cooperate.
 
My Onkyo still does this randomly with my 360 over HDMI, all I do is turn the 360 off then back on and let the receiver re-recognize the input and it always works.
 
Mine used to have this issue too. Quick fix was to set it to stereo and then back to 5.1 in the Xbox menu.
 
This has been an issue with the 360 ever since they started selling them with HDMI.
According to the AVS forums, it relates to them using an older HDMI standard (1.2 I believe), which has minor handshake issues with receivers using the more modern 1.3 and 1.4 standards.
While annoying, one fix is just to toggle the sound setting from 5.1 to stereo and back to 5.1, which will reset the bitstream.
Another fix also relates to the order that you turn your components on. Turn on your receiver and TV first (before the 360) and that'll fix it for some systems.
 
with my receiver i had to run the auto setup before it would output to 5.1
 
Another fix also relates to the order that you turn your components on. Turn on your receiver and TV first (before the 360) and that'll fix it for some systems.

I found this out the hard way years ago with my Denon AVR. Still haven't found a good way to stagger the power on of the X360 with my Harmony remote though. What I've ended up doing is just manually covering the IR sensor on the X360 until the AVR turns on, and then manually power on the X360 afterwards.
 
As Domingo has stated this is a very old issue. The issue was prevalent on my launch 360, the workaround is to disable display discovery.
 
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