Dealbreaker - Open letter to SONY after the broken audio passthrough for KODI

[BooTooo]

I am not going to repeat (again) what has already been described and discussed in so many threats...

https://community.sony.co.uk/t5/android-tv/audio-passthrough/m-p/2366395/highlight/true#M21550

https://community.sony.co.uk/t5/android-tv/mediatek-again-screwed-up-with-nougat-concerning-audio/td...

It is more an open letter to SONY should they care...

Born in the 70s, I have been a big fan (like many) of their products in the 80s (Trinitron TV, walman, miniDisks, phones...).

SONY's catastrophic and bipolar behavious towards MP3 in the 90s forced me to look elsewhere to find a better fit to my consumer's changing behavious that they simply refused to address and showed that, for the first time, technical excellence was no longer their first priority most likely due to internal conflicts between the hardware and content (movies/music) divisions... At the same time, a medium player from Korea (samsung) started to offer good technical alternatives at a better price...

Early 2000, I completly abandonned the SONY brand....

in 2017, I decided to come back to them and purchase 2 SONY Tvs (65 and 42 inchs) and one amplifier for one and one reason only... They integrated Android environment in their TV.

Being part of a 100% android family, I saw incredible benefits having a TV Android enabled that could interract with all my phones and tablets but most importantly, simplify the echosystem by getting rid of all the external boxes, cables and remote controls to have an all in 1 KODI integrated solution.

I cannot express enough my disapointment after 1 year of usage...

- How could you decide to integrate such a mediocre and slowwwwww...SoC (Mediatek) when they could have been flying with an NVidia chip that would be more align with the SONY preimium image...

- How could you release broken firmware with an apps like KODI that has such a high number of users that it has become de facto market standard...

My overall experience has been poor and I do not see any willingness from SONY to correct the buggy situation witch worries me... It is one thing to get it wrong but it is another to do nothing about it...

When the announced NOUGAT update arrives on my TVs, If they do not deliver a product that works with Standard Android API, it will be the last stroke that will definitely end of my relationship with this brand for good...

That would be a shame for them as their marketing departement will classifiy me without any doubts in the prime target segment (VERY high spending power & massive budget allocated to eletronics stuff for the family on a yearly basis...).

Maybe the problem is mass market vs eletronic enthusiats after all... SONY is a safe harbour if you stick to NETFLIX & AMAZON Video... If this is the case, my bad. I will just jump ship (definitely) and will go spend my money elsewhere...

Best

BooTooo

[jumpsuit]

Hi @BooTooo and welcome to the Community

Unfortunately Sony don't respond on this forum.

Have you tried writing to them at Head Office to vent

your concerns?

[Jecht_Sin]

I just went through all of this just recently, with the help of @Kuschelmonschter. You can see the discussion in this thread. Technically the problem isn't with Kodi, but in Android TV 7.0 for Bravia in general. The audio API are broken.

The good news, since you are a Kodi user, is that you can install SPMC (basically a Kodi fork specific for Android TV). You'll get the v17.4 alpha version from the first post in here. You must sideload it (copy it in a USB device and then install it from a File Manager) and then set the passthrough like in here:

Doing so all  AAC, DTS and Dolby Digital audio above DD+ get transcoded into DD (AC3) 5.1. 

I have been testing it in the last couple of days, and my opinion is that, even being an alpha, it is more stable and faster than Kodi. Just one thing, though: Alpha 9 broke the TV Shows scrabber. You must either install the alpha 8 or wait for alpha 10. The developers are aware of it, though.

Oh, regarding the broken passthrough, I am with you. We are all disappointed. This OS implementation is simply a joke.

[Kuschelmonschter]

Read about my experience here. Sony Android TV is easily the worst CE device I ever owned.

[kinggo01]

.....and with every major update it gets even worse.

[Kuschelmonschter]

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Maybe the problem is mass market vs eletronic enthusiats after all... SONY is a safe harbour if you stick to NETFLIX & AMAZON Video...

---

Not at all, and this is probably the most embarrassing thing about those Sony TVs... they can't even get something as mainstream as Amazon Video to work properly. The Amazon Video experience is nothing but a big pain. Other platforms handle it way better...

[kinggo01]

and if nothing but embedded stuff work, how is that a smart platform at all?

[sergio_sch]

+1

Spent 1300€ in a flagship just 5 months ago. If I could travel back in time... a lot of my savings wasted in a TV I should keep for at least 10 years, it is going to be a pain.

[kinggo01]

add another 60€ for xiaomi Mi box and use that as Android TV platform. While still far from nvidia shield it is way less limikted than SONY implementation of android TV.

[sergio_sch]

Does the xiaomi Mi box play h265 HDR 4k content? I would buy it if it was really a fix for that problem.

Currently I'm stuck at android 6.0, with which I can play HDR 4K mkv files up until about 25 Gb at 24 fps and AC-3/DTS audio passthrough is working, over that file size or with 60fps the TV mediatek socket cannot handle h265 files.

I already have an old and abandoned h264 1080p player somewhere, don't need another one because that kind of files play well with the Sony TV android players, so my target is only a cheap player for big h265 mkv files which need good hardware decoder

thank you for your reply