Video signals on modern AVRs

[Tailspin70]

My 10 year old Yamaha receiver has no HDMI inputs so I have my video devices connected directly to the TV via HDMI and have audio connections going to the receiver via optical/coax.

I'm looking at upgrading my AVR and I see them advertize supporting video formats like 4K,8K, HDR, etc and I want to confirm if there are others benefits to having the AVR handle the video signals other than enabling you to have a single connection to the TV and do the video switching from the AVR instead of the TV. It seems silly to need to upgrade an AVR that does great 7.2 sound because it does not handle 4K video (for example). Am I missing something?

 

[James S.]

Having everything going to the receiver and one HDMI to the tv does really simplify things. But more importantly, optical/coax cannot pass Dolby True HD/Atmos or DTS MA/X. You need HDMI for that. I belive it can only pass compressed 5.1 dolby Digital as most. Someone correct me if I am wrong.

 

[lovinthehd]

As long as the avr can handle the pass-thru of the needed video you're good. Took a while for that to settle out with various 4K formats, but its pretty much a done deal with current avrs...8K barely exists (and with eARC would be able to handle even the lossless codecs altho seems they're still sorting things out somewhat in that regard). I wouldn't buy anything for 8k at this point.....heck, I haven't even gone 4k yet.

 

[Tailspin70]

Having everything going to the receiver and one HDMI to the tv does really simplify things. But more importantly, optical/coax cannot pass Dolby True HD/Atmos or DTS MA/X. You need HDMI for that. I belive it can only pass compressed 5.1 dolby Digital as most. Someone correct me if I am wrong.

Yes, that's the main reason I'm upgrading my AVR. Receiver can only handle Dolby 5.1 due to having to use optical so my devices re-encode to DD 5.1 for this to work.

I wanted to check if there was an additional benefit of having the video signals go through the AVR, but only having one connection to the TV is already a benefit. No need to run multiple HDMI cables in the wall.

 

[lovinthehd]

Generally the video processing (vs pass-thru) in an avr is only useful for legacy type stuff (like composite/component input). Most use is in having the avr being able to pass the video out unmolested and being able to process any possible audio format/codec.

 

[Hessel Visser]

Having everything going to the receiver and one HDMI to the tv does really simplify things. But more importantly, optical/coax cannot pass Dolby True HD/Atmos or DTS MA/X. You need HDMI for that. I belive it can only pass compressed 5.1 dolby Digital as most. Someone correct me if I am wrong.

Adat/ toslink can handle 8 channels maximum, in 24bit/48khz wave..