ARC and eARC Explained - An Awesome Feature That You're Probably Not Using (HDMI CEC)

what's up guys this is chris majestic and after constantly seeing questions about this come up in the comments section i figured i'd do another video explaining hdmi cec and arc just to try to clear up some of the confusion [Music] so if you've watched my home theater audio or how to connect a soundbar videos then you might recall me mentioning arc well with arc becoming more popular on tvs and projectors i want to explain what it is why you should use it and how to use it now i did cover quite a bit in the how to connect the soundbar video so i do recommend that you go and watch it if you haven't but long story short the best way to connect your home theater speakers is hdmi and arc allows you to do that so arc stands for audio return channel and it's been around for a few years now and just recently we've started to see the new version known as e-arc or enhanced audio return channel so what's the difference well the original version of arc allowed you to send dts or dolby surround formats to your speakers but it couldn't handle the newer lossless formats like dolby atmos or dts x well e-arc allows you to send all of the latest audio formats including dolby atmos from your tv to your speakers so why is this so complicated well the confusion comes from the fact that hdmi cables are primarily used for sending audio and video to your tv or projector the tricky part is that the same hdmi cable that's being used to send video to your tv can actually be used to send audio to your receiver or sound bar so today i'm going to cover three different scenarios where you would want to use arc alright so let's say you have a smart tv which is probably the case if it's less than five years old and let's say you're using the built-in apps on the tv but you hate how the built-in speakers sound so you go out and buy yourself a sound bar or home theater system so what's the best way to get sound from the tv to the soundbar well the best connection to use is hdmi as long as your tv supports arc and your soundbar or receiver has an hdmi input hdmi ensures that you get the highest quality audio that your tv and speakers will support the second scenario where you will want to use arc is if your soundbar or receiver only has one hdmi port now if your soundbar does have more than one hdmi port then you can connect all of your devices directly to the soundbar and then pass the video out to your tv but if your sound bar only has one hdmi port then you'll want to use arc so in this scenario you have all of your external devices like game systems blu-ray players or streamers connected to your tvs hdmi ports but you want to send the sound out to your sound bar while in this case you would connect an hdmi cable to the arc ports on your tv and receiver and this will allow you to send the best quality sound that the tvs arc port can handle the only downside to this is that if you have a dolby atmos system and your tv doesn't have e-arc you may not be able to send dolby atmos to your speakers it'll usually still send 5.1 surround but it won't send dolby atmos now in this scenario if your tv doesn't have e-arc the only way to get dolby atmos is to use an hdmi splitter and split the signal allowing you to run one hdmi cable to your tv for video and another cable to your soundbar or receiver and the third scenario where you would want to use arc is if you have an outdated speaker system so let's say you have an xbox series x or ps5 and you wanted to play games on your new high-end tv that supports 4k at 120 hertz well even though your receiver or soundbar might support dolby atmos it might not have hdmi 2.1 so it won't support the video signal from your game system well one way around this would be to use arc so this will work just like the last scenario you connect the game console to your tv and then you connect another hdmi cable to the arc ports on your tv and speaker system this will allow you to bypass your receiver or soundbar for video since the console is connected directly to the tv but you'll still be sending high quality sound to your speakers using the tv's arc port and another awesome part about arc that we haven't talked about yet is that it allows your tv receiver and other devices to control each other using hdmi cec so here you can see that the only thing i have here is the tv remote and not only does it turn everything on and off but you can also control the volume of your home theater receiver and even control the streaming device all from the tv remote and this even works in reverse so here i have the remote that came with my nvidia shield and i can use this remote to not only power on everything with the touch of a button but i can also control the volume on my receiver and power everything off without using any other remotes or programming any complex universal remotes this means you only need to use one remote to navigate around and control everything as long as everything is working properly alright so exactly how do you set all of this up well first you need to make sure that both your speaker system and your tv both have arc ports and you have to make sure that hdmi cec is enabled on your tv now hdmi cec goes by different names depending on tv manufacturer samsung calls it any net plus lg calls it simplink and sony calls it braviasync and this website has a bunch of code names so i'll put a link to this in the video description for you to check it out once you have hdmi cec enabled on your tv you plug an hdmi cable into the hdmi port labeled arc on your tv and plug the other end into the arc port on your soundbar or receiver then you'll want to make sure that the sound output from the tv is set to hdmi and make sure your soundbar or receiver is set to the hdmi input once you've done all of this you might have to briefly unplug your tv and speaker system from the wall in order for everything to work properly but after that you should be all set now i know unplugging everything might seem weird but sometimes hdmi cec might be out of sync so if you ever have any issues with it try unplugging everything and plugging it back in now as awesome as and hdmi cec features are they do have a downside to them so remember i mentioned that hdmi cec allows your devices to power each other on or off well this can cause a few issues if you have more than one device connected to your tv so let's say you have an nvidia shield streamer and an xbox connected to your tv and you want to play xbox so you grab the tv remote and turn on the tv while the nvidia shield might turn on since it received the cec signal which causes the tv to switch to the shield input even though you wanted it to switch to the xbox now devices like the nvidia shield do have some options built in to help with this so you can make it so that the shield doesn't force the tv to switch inputs when it's powered on you could also allow it not to be powered on when the tv is powered on and a bunch of other options so if you do have issues there might be a way around it but it will limit the functionality a bit since you might have to use more than one remote alright guys i know that was a lot of information and this video did end up being a lot longer than i expected but hopefully you found it helpful if you did go ahead and make sure you mash that like button for me and as always i will be in the comment section responding to your questions and comments as much as i can and if you haven't subscribed to the channel go ahead and make sure you subscribe and hit that bell notification so you don't miss any new videos thanks for watching guys and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: Chris Majestic

Views: 2,630,425

Keywords: majestechs, hdmi-cec, earc, arc, hdmi arc, hdmi earc, e-arc, hdmi vs optical, what is arc, home theater, what is hdmi arc, hdmi, arc and earc explained, hdmi 2.1, what is hdmi earc, hdmi arc for tv, hdmi cable arc, what is earc, hdmi arc setup, hdmi arc vs optical, hdmi 2.0, audio return channel, hdmi cec, lg tv hdmi arc, enhanced audio return channel, hdmi 2.0 vs hdmi 2.1, connect hdmi arc, arc extractor, sonos beam, sonos arc, how to connect soundbar to tv with hdmi

Id: QkqCPvlf0Y4

Length: 7min 8sec (428 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 16 2021