MediaCodecList answers "can this device decode 5.1", which is not the
question that decides whether the user hears anything: a phone decodes an
AC-3 5.1 track happily and still has two channels to play it out of. The
DeviceProfile carried no MaxAudioChannels, so Jellyfin was free to
direct-play the multichannel track to a two-channel sink — silence or
dialogue folded into surround channels that go nowhere, depending on the
device.
Report media3 AudioCapabilities.maxChannelCount for the current route over
JNI alongside the codec lists, and bound the direct-play and transcoding
profiles (and the HLS URL's TranscodingMaxAudioChannels, previously
hardcoded to 2) by it. No codec is ever removed, so a device with genuine
surround output keeps direct-playing it. A missing or zero reading means
"route not yet established", not "no audio", and falls back to stereo.
dtourolle
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