Continuous Audio Connection when using Dolby/Atmos audio output

[ericrohlman]

ios/tvos 26.4 was shipped with a new feature for Apple TV 4k 2 Gen+ users called "Continuous Audio Connection". It's only activated when the apple TV is connected via HDMI to a Dolby output (sound bar, speaker etc).

The main issue is that the audio stream is being interrupted on initial playback of any HLS stream. Does 0.40.0 have any properties or initial values that need to be set/unset/removed in order to mitigate the playback audio issue? The video playback is solid, however the audio is not being rendered.

[cxfksword]

You can try the --audio-stream-silence and --audio-wait-open options. If that doesn't work, consider submitting an issue to the libmpv repository.

[jodacame]

Hey! I think I ran into the same thing on an Apple TV 4K (tvOS 26) connected to a soundbar — video played fine but there was no sound at all.

After digging into it, my guess is that on these setups the HDMI audio route reports a lot of output channels, and mpv's default audio output (audiounit) just can't open it, so you end up with silence. Other apps work because they use Apple's own audio path.

mpv already has another audio output, avfoundation (it uses AVSampleBufferAudioRenderer), which handles these routes well — but it was only built for macOS, not tvOS. So I made a small change to turn it on for iOS/tvOS and opened a PR here: #73

In my case, once I built with that and used --ao=avfoundation,audiounit, the audio came back (including 5.1) on the TV that used to be silent.

I can't promise it's the exact same cause as yours, but it sounds very close, so it might be worth a try. Happy to help if you want to test it. 🙂