Tidal ATMOS on Google TV Streaming

[RDoc]

I'm using an Nvidia Shield to stream ATMOS music from TIdal through an Integra 3.4. The Shield uses Google TV Tidal app which kind of sucks so I've been trying to come up with how to make this work for music listening flexibility. What I want to do is be able to select more music on my phone as I'm listening, but it's not straightforward to do since Tidal Connect won't stream ATMOS to this setup (there's a separate thread on this).

What I've come up with is to first create a set of permanent ATMOS only playlists, each generally consisting of one album, organized on my phone into folders. The Google TV app doesn't support folders though, only playlists. To get around that, on my phone I select the permanent playlists I want to start with and add them to a temporary playlist PL1 I create to start that session. On the Shield I start playing PL1 by going to my collection entry on the Google Tidal app. When that's nearing the end, or I decide I want to hear something else, I do the same thing and create another temporary playlist PL2, adding the new music I want to it.

Unfortunately, there's no way I know of on the Google Tidal app to modify the next playing list and the Google Tidal app won't refresh the list of playlists or the contents of a playlist until you reselect the collection icon. I just go back to the Tidal action list on the left side and select another icon, such as Search, then reselect the collection to see the changes. It's not necessary to do anything, just deselect and reselect the collection icon. Then the new playlist, PL2, will appear on the Google Tidal app and I can select it to listen to the new set of music. I then delete the entire PL1 playlist on my phone to clean everything up.

This is admittedly a total crock and if anyone has a better method I'm interested. However, please try any suggestions before making them. The Google Tidal app is really a very weak effort and many things that should work don't.

 

[RDoc]

I've been playing with this some more and IMHO Google TV and ATMOS aren't ready for prime time, or even late night reruns. I have 2 Google TV devices, an Nvidea Shield TV and a Sony Bravia TV, both of which can decode ATMOS video from Netflix and ATMOS music from Tidal. They both get extremely unhappy if I mix the two sources.

On the Shield, if I play a Netflix ATMOS video movie, then switch to a Tidal ATMOS track, there is no sound, although non-ATMOS tracks work fine. If I play a non-ATMOS movie first, it's all fine. I have to reset the Shield to get things working again.

On the Sony TV, if I play a Tidal ATMOS track, then try to play a Netflix ATMOS movie, it hangs loading. Sometimes a non-ATMOS movie will play after a very long (30 sec) loading, and sometime the picture gets completely messed up everywhere on the TV irrespective of the source. For example, the lower third is all one green area, or multiple horizontal copies of the same image are shown. If I first play a non-ATMOS music track, there's no problem until I play an ATMOS music track. I have to reset the TV to get it all back in order.

My guess is that the difference in the codex between streaming ATMOS video and music ATMOS isn't handled at all well in the Google TV software and crashes pieces of the system. It's something like once it's decoded one version of the ATMOS stream, it can't switch to the other version, although from the damage wreaked on the TV software it may be worse than that. But, as we used to say, there's no such thing as a minor bug.

My work around is to use the Shield for video and the TV for music which took a bit of Sofabaton programming.

If anyone has played with this I'd be interested in their results.

 

[Tonycv51]

A bit of a late reply but I have this issue with my Chromecast with Google TV. It has maybe improved a bit with a full reset and re install. I get the issue of no sound in tidal if I rewind or skip tracks aggressively. Rather than a full reset I usually find stopping the tidal app and clearing the cache can work, but sometimes requires a reboot as well. I no longer have Atmos on my Netflix subs, but see similar between Now TV and Tidal. Thinking about it I need to check if the Apple TV app is any better Vs the other Atmos apps. I raised the tidal specific issue with tidal but didn't really get anywhere - the fact it happens cross apps makes me suspect it's a Google TV issue and not the app developers