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I have used this software for years and have never had to do any serious settings adjustments,but with surround and ATMOS , it is not so easy to suss
It doesn't help that there's no mention,
whatsoever, of 'Dolby Atmos' in the promo blurbs of PowerDVD (up to and including v21).
Perhaps Cyberlink believes that its customers are all au fait with the myriad flavours of Dolby/DTS formats; and so doesn't see much point in providing format information, and how PowerDVD processes the various formats and codecs.
There is
nothing about the architectures of the various Dolby/DTS formats that is self-evidently intuitive to the average user of PowerDVD i.e. not everyone is a Home-theatre audio enthusiast.
For those unfamiliar with, or are new to, 'Dolby Atmos', if the audio of the source disk/file is Atmos-encoded then PowerDVD will 'pass-through' the raw audio-stream to whatever device will be doing the processing of your audio (e.g. A/V receiver). Provided your audio-processor is Atmos-capable, it will distribute the correct audio to the correct speakers.
I have tested Atmos soundtracks in PowerDVD 21 Ultra on my laptop whose HDMI output is connected to my Yamaha A/V receiver (the receiver's audio processor is set to 'Direct'). All good here.
Caveat: the HDMI archirecture - despite being touted as 'one connector to rule them all' - is brimming with numerous 'incompatibility' shortcomings that range from HDCP to 'HDMI Version' issues. All great fun! So if you can't get PowerDVD to play nice with the other components in home-theatre chain, it may not be Cyberlink's fault.