After many years of struggling with trying to get my AppleTV (mk1) to a state where the surround sound actually works, I finally have it solved.
The answer was, buy a new surround decoder box.
So now I have a nice, shiny Yahama A/V amp that decodes AC3 and DTS from the optical output of the ATV. Yet not just this wonderful feature is what makes this new amp great. What it has also done is about halve the amount of cabling in my bedroom A/V setup. Whereas previously where was a separate hifi amp, surround decoder and speaker set, A/V switchbox, 2 optical/co-ax transceivers + power supplies – now there is the one gox to rule them all as it were. So now I have (almost) all the previous kit plugged into the same device and can switch between it, with the bonus of 7.1(!) surround capabilities.
So I can switch between the ATV, Wii, Galaxy Tab multimedia dock, Sega Saturn, Humax PVR & Toshiba DVD player from one place, each with their own appropriate speaker settings auto-selected.
The only thing it doesn’t do is transcode between HDMI/Component/Composite video (each source-type only talks to its corresponding output), so I’ll still have to select differing inputs on the projector, although the HDMi out from the amp will go through a HDFury box to convert it to component as that’s what my projector supports… Which means I still need the vga sswitchbox that currenty links the sources to the projector, but that’s not too much of a bind really.
So now all the 720p movies that previously played without sound (like the Star Trek movie collection and also the as yet unwatched-in-one-sitting Bourne trilogy) all play in HD (thanks to XBMC now having GPU accelleration on the ATV) and with full surround sound.
SO thank you Yamaha for enabling a geek to lie in bed and be appropriately surrounded by really-big-screen entertainment!
Just another reason for not having to leave the house! 😉