Anthem & Xfinity

I think you are stuck with 2 channel on most on demand, unless listed as HD. Back to using prologic II?

Jjrenman: this problem is only with on demand shows. live & dvr-ed shows are great in 5.1.

Elevick: I have xfinity X1 service. and only watch HD programs. I though the 2-channel would at least give me prologic II.

I also have a emotive umc-200. all on demand shows are in 5.1 dolby digital!! it must be a hdmi thing. maybe no 5.1 thur optical.

"it must be a hdmi thing. maybe no 5.1 thur optical."

There was a recent thread that discussed this issue. IIRC, the bottom line is that there is not enough bandwith for 5.1 through optical.

Check out this thread. It may have the answer you seek.

http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?bhome&137459184705

Did you set your X-1 to surround sound ? its in the device setup menu. Also keep in mind there are still a few bugs with the X-1 platform but the good news its getting better with each update they do.

I suggest you definitively confirm with Xfinity that the audio is indeed being broadcast in 5.1 with audio coming from all channels. As others have noted, I have heard that many on-demand programming is only in stereo regardless of what the signal is to the processor. So before driving yourself nuts, confirm that to be the case. The fact that you are getting 5.1 from other channels almost confirms this. I highly doubt the issue is with the Anthem and it's not a bandwidth issue with toslink or S/PDIF. You can get 5.1 just fine through those. Bandwidth limitation over those is only normally confined to lossless codecs.