Dolby Digital Plus on Beam surrounding

It may be that som TVs will transcode Dolby Digital Plus to Dolby Digital. My experience is that most won't. I have seen some post that their Philips TVs does this but at least my Sony and LG sets haven’t been able to. 
 

My best advice is to get an Apple TV for streaming. It will transcode anything to DD 5.1 on the fly which the Beam will able to utilize. 
 

Don’t get your hopes up for Dolby Digital Plus on the Beam. There have been a lot of posts on this topic since the Beam was released and some speculated that DD Plus would come with S2 alongside the Sonos Arc. Unfortunately, while the Arc did come with support for DD Plus, none of Sonos’ existing products were upgraded to do the same. Not even the fairly new Sonos Amp. 

My Samsung QE65Q90 also sends DD (not plus) to my Beam via HDMI-ARC from Netlix - so would my old UE46D8000.

One thing is what the tv can do with build-in apps. Most TVs will happily play DD from Netflix using their build-in apps. However, from my experience, not many TVs will convert a DD Plus signal from e.g. a Chromecast to DD and the pass that on to the Beam. 

Au, right. I did not realise you meant DD+ From external sources.

Yeah. The issue is really with the various streaming sticks which have no way of changing audio formats on their streams. As the default streaming option for surround on Netflix is DD+, many Chromecast-users simply cannot get a surround signal to their Beam/Amp/Playbar/Playbase from Netflix. 

As was the case with my old UE46D8000 and Chromecast. Haven’t tested it with the new TV (I use Airplay on that).

The tv is a ancient Philip from 2007. It has HDMI but no ARC. The digital out doesn't seemed to work properly. I maybe willing to replace the TV, but unfortunately not every TV will downmix DD+ to DD through ARC, it's more likely to work through the digital out. TV do not explicitly state if they will downmix. snaptube for pc jiofi.local.html 

It seems that the patents on Dolby Digital (AC3) and Dolby Digital Plus (E-AC3) have expired.

Wikipedia says “The full set of technical specifications for E-AC-3 (and AC-3) are standardized and published in Annex E of ATSC A/52:2012, as well as Annex E of ETSI TS 102 366 V1.2.1 (2008–08)”.

On a forum I found a link to a full list of Dolby patents for that . According to the poster, “The last U.S patent seems to be US6246345 which seems to have expired on 2019-07-08.”

If so, I suppose that adding Dolby Digital Plus support to the Beam would not result in extra licensing costs for Sonos. In fact, the Dolby Digital (plain, no plus) patents expired in 2017, so they have never had to pay to license those patents for the Beam, at least. They do probably have to pay to mention the trademarks Dolby has on DD and DD+, but as patents on both have expired, I cannot imagine that it’s more for DD+ than DD.

Now Sonos does have to license Atmos etc. from Dolby, and that probably comes with a lot of conditions such as “if you implement DD+ on any devices you can’t call it E-AC3, you have to call it DD+ and pay for the trademark”.
 

But apart from updating the firmware and opening a can of lawyers, Sonos could probably without too much cost add DD+ support to the Beam. Why don’t they?

I think you answered you’re own question.  As you pointed out, Sonos can’t market that they have DD+ if they aren’t playing Dolby to do so.  Do you think Dolby is going to allow use of trademark, or even license use of codecs to Sonos if they see Sonos stealing other codecs, legally or otherwise?  I certainly would not if I were running Dolby.    Put a different way, Dolby would likely stop doing business with Sonos if Sonos was using dolby codecs and not paying for it, regardless of patent status. What about other businesses that Sonos deals with, you think they are going to be as willing to enter in with contracts with Sonos?  

If that’s actually what’s happening across the industry, no one is paying for DD  or DD+ anymore, then ok.  I seriously doubt that’s what’s happening though.  The only companies that are going to steal code like that are companies that have nothing to lose by doing so, either because they are too small to worry about or too big, like Google and Amazon, to litigate against.

You misunderstand me, I’m not proposing they should “steal” anything at all.

I just think that adding DD+ has become a lot cheaper, if not almost free, for Sonos. DD+ now has the same status as plain DD, and they probably are paying for that (for the trademark/logo) anyway.

Maybe I should have been clearer _why_ I posted this, that is, “why doesn’t Sonos add DD+ to the beam” since the answer “they are not going to pay the extra license costs for products that have already been sold” might not be valid anymore. I think it’s interesting.

And I don’t want to rehash the whole conversation, but the fact that I have an expensive surround set that can’t even play 5.1 surround from basically any streaming service is ridiculous. They should fix that.

If that’s actually what’s happening across the industry, no one is paying for DD  or DD+ anymore, then ok. 

Well I do think that it’s interesting that a Samsung TV from 2014 does not support Dolby Digital passthrough (so HDMI in → HDMI-ARC out to soundbar). Most TVs from that era didn’t. And starting in 2017, most TVs now _do_ support that. Note that the DD (AC-3) patents expired in 2017.