5.1 sound in Netflix on Windows 10

[Underseer]

Whoopsie. It never occurred to me to test if I was actually getting 5.1 sound.

If you watch Netflix in a browser, it's just stereo. If you use the Netflix Windows app available from the Windows store, you can hear 5.1.

To find out if your setup is properly producing 5.1 sound, Netflix has helpfully provided a tool for testing. Just search for "test pattern" in Netflix and watch season 1, episode 1 (I honestly can't tell what the other episodes are for).

If your setup only does two channel stereo, you will hear a robotic voice counting. If you have 5.1 sound, you will hear a series of noises in each speaker in succession.

Here's a direct link for your browser if you have a Netflix account:

https://www.netflix.com/title/80018499

 

[Underseer]

If you feel brave and use a Chrome browser, you can type "chrome://flags" in the address window, then Ctrl-F and search for "try-supported-channel-layouts" and enable it.

Theoretically, this should allow some computers to decode Dolby Surround from 2 channels to 4.0 channel Dolby Surround (left, center, right, and a mono channel for rears downmixed into two channels), but that didn't work on my setup.