No Dolby Atmos on BT Sport App (Shield TV/Fire Stick)

[ch2]

Hello, I currently subscribe to BT Sport Ultimate via my EE subscription with the Large Screen addon to watch on my TV and have done for over a year now.

However, I've never been able to get Dolby Atmos to work.  I've tried using both my Nvidia Shield TV Pro and the Amazon Fire Stick 4K.  I can confirm that other apps like Apple TV and Netflix on those devices stream Dolby Atmos just fine to my receiver.  

On the video side, 4K and HDR work great, its just the audio is always bog standard 2.0 channel.  I generally have noticed this during the midday Saturday Premier League games which I'm pretty sure should all be Dolby Atmos.  Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

[NeilO]

@ch2 Thanks for posting and sorry about the reply. @DarrenDev might be able to offer you some advice with this as far as I know it should work with compatible devices. 

Thanks

Neil

[DarrenDev]

Apologies @ch2, I somehow missed this post on Saturday.

Could you please send me a DM with your BT ID, so that I can confirm what your device is telling us it's capable of.

[DarrenDev]

Thanks for the DM.  I can confirm that when you watched Man C v Chelsea on Saturday, you were viewing our Atmos-enabled stream on BT Sport Ultimate at the maximum possible quality.

What makes you think it wasn't Atmos?  Is there a visual indicator on your receiver that it's consuming an Atmos stream?

[ch2]

Hi @DarrenDev  thanks for looking into that.

My receiver (Denon AVR 1700H) only saw 2.0 channels as the input and no Atmos was detected.  It also sounded quite poor and definitely lacking as a multichannel source.

As mentioned above it works fine on other apps with the same device.  This is also my second receiver I've had, same issue with my older Denon too.  

I will try again tomorrow with both devices and see if I can get some more data about the audio input detected.

[ch2]

Hi @DarrenDev 

I tried watching the Brighton v Chelsea game on Ultimate and again only 2.0 sound is being picked up by my receiver.  That said it does detect a Dolby Digital+ signal but only two speakers active.

Here is the information from my receiver - see 2/0/.0 being listed and the input signal.

 

It looks exactly the same when streaming via the Fire TV 4K. 

 

However, interestingly when using Chromecast from my phone to the same Nvidia Shield, a proper Dolby Atmos signal is detected.  It just seems to be the native apps where I'm struggling:

Thanks for your help.

[DarrenDev]

That's very confusing @ch2 as last night's match wasn't broadcast in Atmos (according to our data). I would have expected 5.1 though, so only seeing 2 channels in the DD+ container is concerning. I'll do some testing today to confirm, but my set up isn't quite as fancy as yours - I may need some help from you to confirm.

[ch2]

@DarrenDev I was mostly watching the Tottenham game this evening which was showing 2.0 sound although I suspect that was supposed to be?  I'm not sure if 5.1 is the standard on other streams.

When I switched over to the game on Ultimate it was the same issue as above.  However about 80 minutes in I quit the app and reloaded as I was having streaming issues and lo and behold - the Atmos stream appeared!  

[DarrenDev]

@ch2 I've pushed an update to the public beta for BT Sport app on Android TV.  I already had logs that reported how many audio channels the device is capable of, but this update will now also report to me how many audio channels are being presented to the device when the video starts.  If you opt into the beta (from the Play Store listing), you should find app version 1.2.0 is now available.

The next time you're watching content on BT Sport Ultimate and notice that you're only getting 2 channels, could you please let me know and I'll see what it looks like from our end.

I'll hopefully be releasing the update to all devices later this week, so I can start to get some stats on the number of devices playing the surround sound stream but only seeing 2 audio channels available.

[ch2]

Hi @DarrenDev 

Some updates from the football this week. 

Tuesday's game on Ultimate I was not able to get Dolby Atmos.  I can't remember now if I did manage to get it to work by quitting the app and re-entering.

Wednesday's game on Ultimate - Dolby Atmos working no problem first time.

Thursday's game on Ultimate - no Dolby Atmos again, tried with both Shield TV and Fire TV several times.