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I am trying to passthrough Dolby Atmos content to an AV receiver from an older Acer laptop, but the audio passthrough option is not present in VLC.

  • Source: 7.1 channel TrueHD Atmos 1080p content (Dolby Atmos demo video, codec verified).
  • A/V receiver: Denon (supports TrueHD, Atmos)
  • OS version: Ubuntu 20.04
  • Media player: VLC 3.0.11

The missing configuration part (marked in red) on a newer Windows 10 laptop running the same VLC version which when configured for passthrough plays the Atmos content without issues (confirmed by AV receiver).

VLC missing audio passthrough options

What could be the cause of missing audio passthrough option? Could it be the older HDMI specification on the older laptop, or lack of drivers? As it is, the older laptop when configured through the Ubuntu sound settings can play 7.1 surround sound but this is not ideal as it doesn't support Atmos or TrueHD.

EDIT1: Tried PulseAudio with pavucontrol and it showed some passthrough options when configured as mentioned in this thread but it did not correctly passthrough TrueHD/Atmos content.

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The problem was with the default VLC build not including the passthrough option, changing the graphics driver was unnecessary. I ended up using mpv player with the option --audio-spdif=<codecs> as explained in the docs.

My mpv config file /etc/mpv/mpv.conf

audio-spdif=dts-hd,ac3,eac3,truehd

Old answer (incorrect): The problem was fixed after installing the Radeon graphics driver (Catalyst software) instead of using the generic driver provided by Ubuntu.

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