The driver looks at the hardware and decides to either pass on dolby etc... or just stereo.
Not even guaranteed the driver will ever do that unless modified.
So if your hardware is licensed to work with dolby, then the driver should pass dolby surround to the device, or its the wrong driver, or the device is wrong for the driver.I had an issue with my stereo TV. The windows sound driver saw the TV as stereo and even though I had my dolby receiver on the audio pass through for the TV, it did not know that. I had to modify the TV monitor driver to tell the PC driver it was dolby capable, then it worked. I have a thread on that in this forum, some could make it work and some could not.
Windows has made it highly convoluted and a pain to get dolby surround out of the PC and one reason is the sound chip maker for the audio chip on the board may not have paid royalties to Dolby, so the sound chip driver just never will work for anything but stereo, unless you get a driver that has been modified to work.
- - - Updated - - -here is another little know fact, if you have a Firestick you can get dolby 5.1 when watching Netflix. But if you watch Disney Plus, you only get stereo.
To get dolby 5.1 on Disney Plus, you have to have a Firestick 4K.
I went through that last year, so I had to get the Firestick 4K to get decent 5.1 sound on everything.another fact, you cant get dolby 5.1 on youtube videos, which is kind of bad. I like the sound of 5.1 over stereo.
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I get 5.1 dolby on my win 10 PC running WMC, which you can still get from the Green Button forum. So all my OTA TV is recorded in dolby 5.1
I have 8TB of drives recording TV shows.I was thinking some more on this dolby issue. If you use a video card that is also passing Dolby through the HDMI port, and you have an spdif dolby receiver, you can get on Amazon an HDMI switch box that splits out the dolby sound stream to an spdif coaxial port, and then you will get dolby into the receiver and not have to deal with sound chip drivers. That is how I do it on my media center PC using a GT730 nvidia card.
If you have a newer HDMI receiver, it also ought to get the dolby signal from the HDMI cable plugged into it from the video card and work without having to deal with any sound drivers.
The only real problem I had was making the onboard sound chip on the motherboard output dolby 5.1 out of its spdif port, and that requires a modified driver, if the driver you have does not work. I was able to find one that was modified and I got dolby 5.1 from the onboard sound chip
If you buy a dolby licensed sound card for a PC, then it ought to work for Dolby sound and you wont need any modified drivers perhaps USB or PCIe, it should just work as they paid the license fee for Dolby.
- - - Updated - - -One reason I never bothered with youtube TV is I think it has no dolby support. I get dolby fine with WMC and all my local OTA channels for free.
