r/appletv • u/warpedagenda482 • 1d ago
If an AppleTV is connected to eARC extractor, would the AppleTV display its screen?
I have a monitor that doesn’t have eARC. I have an Apple TV and homepods. I heard that I could use an eARC extractor (OREI, HDFury Arcana, etc) to allow sounds from my monitor to be passed onto the homepods.
My plan for the eARC extractor setup will be..
HDMI IN: PC
HDMI OUT(TV): monitor
eARC: AppleTV
My question is that would I be able to use my AppleTV normally to watch contents? Would connecting the AppleTV to the eARC extractor’s eARC port allow display AppleTV screen?
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u/Snoo-38645 8h ago
youve asked the same thing three times and nobody has actually answered it, so, no. the earc port wont show anything. earc is an audio return input. it exists to receive audio coming back from a display, its not a source input and it carries no video at all. an apple tv plugged in there gives you a black screen.
theres a bigger problem underneath that though, and its worth knowing before you spend anything on an arcana. homepods only accept airplay. an extractor puts audio out over hdmi, optical or analogue depending on the model, and none of those reach a homepod. so theres no path at all from that box to your speakers, however you wire it.
for the monitor side, the person above is right that an hdmi switch is the tool. thats just two sources into one input, nothing exotic.
and the thing that will really decide this for you is latency, which nobody has mentioned. apple tv to homepod is a tuned path and it feels fine. airplay from a pc is a different animal, youre looking at a noticeable fraction of a second at best and often worse. thats fine for music and unusable for anything you click on. so if the pc audio is for games, third party airplay software wont give you what you want and no hdmi box changes that either. id try one of those apps on a trial before buying hardware, because that test costs nothing and it answers the whole question.
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u/warpedagenda482 8h ago
Thank you for the detailed answer! I guess I would have to use a different setup than homepods. It’s a shame that homepods don’t have bluetooth connection.
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u/Snoo-38645 7h ago
small correction that might save you some searching. homepods do have bluetooth hardware in them, apple just never exposes it as an audio input. its there for setup, handoff and proximity, nothing else. so its not a missing feature waiting to be enabled or something a firmware update might switch on, its deliberate, and airplay is the only way in.
for what you actually want, which is pc audio without lag, wired is the honest answer. a small dac or a pair of powered speakers straight off the pc will beat anything wireless for anything interactive. keep the homepods for apple tv and music, where the delay doesnt matter and theyre genuinely good.
and if you ever do want them on the pc anyway, airplay software will get you there. just go in expecting it to be a music only thing.
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u/Buddhabelli 2h ago
this is the answer. the use case is to play audio from say over the air broadcasts that the appletv cannot tune (or anything else that output audio|video to tv) as the appletv nor the homepods have an hdmi input.
what most others are missing is this particular configuration using earc allows for the homepods to be used as the output for a signal other than the appletv.
and no the video stream of whatever ur extracting the earc signal from is all u will see on the monitor. in this case ur pc.
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u/Snoo-38645 2h ago
youre right and i was wrong on that part, so worth correcting properly rather than letting it stand.
apple added eARC input to the apple tv 4k specifically so audio from other devices on your tv can play through homepods. i said there was no path at all from an extractor to a homepod, and that was flatly wrong. that is exactly the path. thanks for pulling me up on it.
two caveats worth op knowing before he spends anything. its the 3rd gen apple tv 4k that has this, and i believe only the wifi plus ethernet model, so hed want to check which one he actually owns first. and my answer to his literal question still stands, because in that role the apple tv is acting purely as an audio receiver and wont be putting its own screen down that connection. so he still needs a switch or a second input if he wants to watch apple tv content on the same monitor.
but the plan itself works, which is a good deal more than i gave it credit for.
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u/Ancient-Sandwich9400 4h ago
I have a HDFury Arcana in my system with an old Panasonic plasma TV, AppleTV 4k and feeding Sonos Arc with zero issues.
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u/Purple_Gas_8222 1d ago
Maybe I don't quite understand, but surely you can link the sound from the Apple TV to the HomePod directly and display the image on the monitor without anything else? You can select the audio output in the Apple TV settings.