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Anonymous User
Not applicable

Bad video and sound quality on now tv on LG TV

This page says I should be able to stream full HD and DD 5.1 with my LG TV. I'm getting stereo and video that varies between poor SD and 720p a lot of the time, it does manage 1080p sometimes. I never get DD 5.1

My subscription includes boost - although that seems a waste of money given I don't reliably get 1080p and never get DD5.1

I'm using an LG CX TV with s/w version 04.40.10

ARC to a Yamaha receiver

rock solid 50Mb internet connection

 

 

  • LG
1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION
gavs82008
Legend 5
Legend 5

@Anonymous User 

For 5.1 sound you’ll need to adjust settings on the TV along with in the app itself.

https://help.nowtv.com/article/how-to-adjust-audio-settings

To select surround sound:

  • Step 1: In the NOW app, go to My Account and Settings and ensure that Surround sound is selected.
  • Step 2: On your LG TV, go to All settings, then Sound and Additional settings and ensure DTV Audio is set to Dolby Digital Plus orDolby Digital.

As for the 1080p, have you tried unplugging both your TV and router for a minutes?

You could also clear/delete the data and cache of the app.

FYI that I do not work for NOW, just a NOW customer trying to help

View solution in original post

16 REPLIES 16
commanda6
Legend 5
Legend 5

@Anonymous User wrote:
The cx supports eARC. My old Yamaha amp only supports ARC. With the blue
ray player running hdmi to the tv and toslink to the amp, the amp
automatically flips to the toslink for dd5.1 etc. when I play a blue ray
disc

@Anonymous User if it's working perfectly for your needs, then I'd say leave it as it is. 😀

I was just concerned that you might be limiting yourself with your current setup as typically in order to get the most out of Blu-ray discs. It is advisable to have Blu-ray players connected directly to an AV receiver input via HDMI , rather than being connected to the TV directly. Thereby bypassing bypassing HDMI ARC altogether and allowing you to take advantage of every single format your AV receiver supports. Now should be outputting in Dolby Digital plus, for its 5.1 audio. Assuming your setup supports it. If your setup doesn't support it get Dolby Digital output your AV receiver should tell you what it is outputting. 😉

With the advent of e-ARC assuming that all devices in the chain support e-ARC lack format support is no longer an issue. I've never seen standard ARC go above DD plus or DTS in terms of format support.

Right now, onto @RoyB 's problem.

It's always been my understanding that the DTS format is supposed to be backwards compatible similar to the Dolby formats. So if your setup doesn't support DTS Master audio then it should try an output in DTS HD or DTS, but in your case it doesn't seem to be doing that would suggest you might have an even bigger problem. There any audio settings on your Blu-ray player itself. If so, it may be set use Dolby formats. The Xbox one family of devices. For example, does something similar. Mine, for instance, is set as Dolby Atmos and output as Dolby Digital plus, where Atmos is not supported

I have to say Les Miserables  seems to be a rather special Blu-ray if it doesn't possess a Dolby Digital plus/Dolby Digital audio track as a fallback, so I think you find yourself to be in quite a unique situation.


I do not work for Now . I am simply a Now customer trying to help I am a Community Contributor This means that I know a lot about the service. But just like you I am still a customer. This means I cannot help you with issues that would involve looking into your account directly. A member of the now TV forum team or live chat will need to assist you with these issues.
commanda6
Legend 5
Legend 5

I am aware that the CX would not be exactly the same as the one C1 and C2 @RoyB . The CX would be running running webOS 5 . Before I had my C1. I did have a 2020 WebOS5  LG TV which my grandmother is has now inherited. I agree with you that there is something likely wrong with the setup on the @Anonymous User 's CX 

the fact that LG keeps changing the layout of their settings menus doesn't really help the situation here, but here would be my recommendation , bearing in mind that most of the settings names that we are  talking about here haven't changed since WebOS4 . But where the settings can be found within the menus has so @Anonymous User might need to go on a bit of a hunt.

ensure that 'digital audio out' is set to auto and not PCM . If I remember correctly WebOS5  could  occasionally be funny with audio when the above-mentioned setting was set to pass through

@Anonymous User  just to confirm you are using the Smart TV functions on LG TV itself to access Now and not an external device that is connected to the TV via HDMI? If you're using an external device to access Now you will also need to ensure that 'HDMI output format' is also set to bitstream and not PCM

with respect to the information that is in Nows help article in relation to this, due to the amount of changes that have occurred to LG TVs with respect to audio in the past four or five years. It is no longer sufficient to have basic generic advice in that article . The problem with that is that it's going to make things significantly more complicated from a support point of view.


I do not work for Now . I am simply a Now customer trying to help I am a Community Contributor This means that I know a lot about the service. But just like you I am still a customer. This means I cannot help you with issues that would involve looking into your account directly. A member of the now TV forum team or live chat will need to assist you with these issues.
RoyB
Legend

@commanda6 @Anonymous User 

Yes, I agree 5.1 implies external speakers, and indeed @Anonymous User mentions a Yamaha receiver.

I just threw in that comment about internal speakers for completeness.

Which logically, I suppose, should have had me mentioning that all my HDMI ins are set to bitstream; I didn’t because I knew we were talking about Now on the TV, and not any external inputs.

I also have to bear in mind that when playing discs, for the full experience, the video goes to the GX TV, and the audio connection is to the GX soundbar, which can handle DTS when the disc proffers it; the GX TV can’t even pass this through.

However, the BluRay player is normally set to send both video and audio to the TV, so the rest of the family don’t have to faff about manually setting the soundbar from eARC to HDMI, which is a needed step when video and audio are split.

Set a Payment PIN on your account so that no-one but you can buy memberships on it. Check your bank accounts monthly for any other unexpected payments to Now. That way you can at least nip them in the bud, while you and Now figure out whose fault they are.
RoyB
Legend

@Anonymous User @commanda6 

Can you not connect to the Yamaha via HDMI?

My UHD player has two HDMI outputs, so I can send video via one of them to the TV and audio via the other to the soundbar.

I used to need this with a Yamaha soundbar that, confronted with the Planet Earth UHD DISC, couldn’t pass the video requiring HDCP 2.1 back out to the TV, while the TV couldn’t pass the audio on the disc unscathed over ARC to the soundbar, so no single HDMI connection could do the whole job.

But splitting the video and audio meant the UHD player could send the DHCP 2.1-requiring video to the TV, and the better-than-ARC-requiring audio to the soundbar.

I thought I could give up needing two connections when I got the GX TV with its eARC, but annoyingly it can’t handle DTS audio, so I still need the second cable to the GX soundbar, which can.

After some fiddling about this morning, in pursuit of what this thread is about, I now have the UHD player with video and audio permanently split, and when I put it on, the audio signal causes the soundbar to go into HDMI automatically and play the audio, while the TV shows the video.

To get back to normal TV, which needs the soundbar to be on eARC, you variously have to just select TV, when it will go back to eARC some of the time, or power the TV off and on again.

What the mechanisms here might be are buried deep in the CEC rules, and I haven’t figured out a pattern yet, but the main thing is, it’s a simple instruction for the family to follow, rather than having to fetch me to fix it.

Set a Payment PIN on your account so that no-one but you can buy memberships on it. Check your bank accounts monthly for any other unexpected payments to Now. That way you can at least nip them in the bud, while you and Now figure out whose fault they are.
RoyB
Legend

@commanda6 @Anonymous User 

We’re getting away from the Now issue now, I know, but I’ve just made a horrifying discovery.

Picking out a BluRay to test DTS - Les Miserables in DTS Master Audio, and only that, to test how the GX TV and the GX soundbar, respectively, handle it, it seems that neither does, and the audio is PCM Stereo on both 😢

I would expect this on the TV, but the soundbar is supposed to support DTS-X, which is in turn supposed to support the lesser DTS formats, like Master Audio.

But the BluRay player has a button on the remote that you can press, to tell you both what the disc is capable of, and what it is actually feeding each output with after the handshake with the device on the other end.

The video is fine, and the output is the same as what the disc says it is capable of. 
 
But the audio, both as output with the video on the player’s video/audio HDMI 1, and as output on the audio-only HDMI 2, is just PCM.

I tried suppressing the audio on HDMI 1, vis the player’s option to make this channel video-only, in case this was to do with the dual video output, but while this did indeed remove the audio details for this channel, shown on the player’s display, the audio-only channel was still showing only PCM.

This looks to me like the GX soundbar is not doing what LG claim for it; but before I complain to them, can anyone think of anything I might be doing wrong here? Or things to try?

Set a Payment PIN on your account so that no-one but you can buy memberships on it. Check your bank accounts monthly for any other unexpected payments to Now. That way you can at least nip them in the bud, while you and Now figure out whose fault they are.
commanda6
Legend 5
Legend 5

@Anonymous User @RoyB you should both make sure that 5.1 audio is working today as watching 'house of the Dragon' without 5.1 audio would be against the laws of entertainment 😁


I do not work for Now . I am simply a Now customer trying to help I am a Community Contributor This means that I know a lot about the service. But just like you I am still a customer. This means I cannot help you with issues that would involve looking into your account directly. A member of the now TV forum team or live chat will need to assist you with these issues.
RoyB
Legend

Things are now worse on the GX setup than before. The soundbar has lost its eARC option, does not respond to the Off on the On/off button on its remote, and no longer turns on when the TV turns on.

This is not correct. I shall have strong words with it.

Set a Payment PIN on your account so that no-one but you can buy memberships on it. Check your bank accounts monthly for any other unexpected payments to Now. That way you can at least nip them in the bud, while you and Now figure out whose fault they are.