I have my Chromecast with Google TV (HD) connected to my AVR. The AVR is connected to my TV. This TV is older gen, so it doesn't have eARC, only the older CEC/ARC which I don't want to use due to practical reasons. So I've leaned on toslink thus far, in addition to having normal HDMI from the AVR connected as well for video. Toslink was mainly used for getting sound back to the AVR from apps in the TV.
When I played certain 5.1 media from the Chromecast in the beginning, the AVR by default, received it as PCM stereo. I got around this by enabling optical passthrough and ticking the AC3 encoding box, in the Chromecast settings.
I want to ask if this actually does what I think it does.
Seemingly, everything plays now. My question is, does this mean the Chromecast with Google TV then has the ability to transcode/re-encode e.g. DTS-HD to AC3 on the fly before sending it to the AVR? This then goes through the TV and back via toslink and plays on the AVR as AC3? Or is the sound intercepted straight away at the AVR, and the optical passthrough is just a naming thing.
Thanks.
