MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
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Apologies for long luddite post.
I've treated us to a new telly box, it's a UHD jobbie. I've got a standard HD (not q) sky box, x box one and an old LG sound bar.
At the minute sky box and xbox are plugged in to the sound bar via hdmi which is probably 5 years old, then one hdmi going in to the new telly from the sound bar, I've also got an optical lead from sound bar in to new telly.
Am I hindering the tellys ability by going through the soundbar, would I be better routing everything directly in to the tv, it does have 3 hdmi ports.
It's a pain having to flick through the sources on the soundbar to then feed the correct input to the tv, also if I watch anything like Netflix or any of the included streaming channels on the new tv I need to use the optical settings on the soundbar to hear it.
Just watched a bbc stream in uhd and it was incredible, having come from a 7 year old Samsung original smart tv.
Thoughts?
Am I hindering the tellys ability by going through the soundbar
Well, HDMI is HDMI, it's digital so the signal is either there or it isn't. However, 4K requires a higher HDMI standard, you need "high speed" HDMI support throughout including the cables.
At the minute sky box and xbox are plugged in to the sound bar via hdmi
I've never used it, but you can plug the Sky box into the Xbox as a tuner.
if I watch anything like Netflix or any of the included streaming channels on the new tv I need to use the optical settings on the soundbar to hear it.
Can you use all those with the Xbox as the source instead? I use Netflix on the Xbox, it's far more up to date than the built-in "smarts" on the TV.
I think if it were me I think I'd want to connect everything to the telly, then use the soundbar as (HDMI) audio output from the TV. But that's dependent on you having enough connections.
Enabling HDMI-CRC across the board might help with channel selection (branded variously as Regza-link, Viera-link and a hundred others but it's all the same thing), though the Xbox annoyingly doesn't support it yet.
I think the Netflix on the tv is bang up to date as it wanted me to up my sub by several quid to get the uhd version or something.
Ah, good point. Off the top of my head I think you need the One S (or X) rather than standard One for 4K video.
I'd definitely be putting all of the sources directly into the TV, and then connecting the soundbar to the TV with HDMI (preferred) or optical. If you've three inputs then you should be sorted. The TV will them tell the soundbar what to do (HDMI-CEC) and what to play (HDMI-ARC), and you'll be able to lose the soundbar remote.
Ok, will have a juggle with that tomorrow, xbox is a one s version. The tv has mentioned arc several times and I know the soundbar does have that as one of its sources. The tv remote (it came with two actually, one standard one smart) is a fancy silver thing that has very few buttons but has a touch sensitive round disc along with voice recognition or something. Clearly I haven't looked at the manual!