Thankfully, both the Xbox Series X and the PS5 support all the movie sound formats for 4K Blu-ray that you’d expect them to - including the ‘object-based’ Dolby Atmos and DTS:X formats found on most (unless they’re films by Christopher Nolan) 4K Blu-rays.
In fact, Microsoft was noticeably specific in not mentioning 4K Blu-ray support when it first announced it would be supporting Dolby Vision for gaming, and Sony is yet to even mention Dolby Vision as a possibility at all, even for streaming, on either the PS4 or PS5.Īudio compatibility, implementation and quality Neither Sony nor Microsoft has so far mentioned this as a possibility, however. It’s possible, I guess, that Dolby Vision or (less likely) HDR10+ might be added to the two consoles’ 4K Blu-ray support via future firmware updates. After all, the Xbox Series X has announced that it will support Dolby Vision for both streaming services and games, while Sony’s standalone 4K Blu-ray players (and TVs) almost all support Dolby Vision playback. The lack of Dolby Vision support on either player seems particularly unfortunate. If you have an Xbox Series X (but not a Series S), you also have yourself a 4K Blu-ray movie disc. This means that they can’t take advantage of the extra scene by scene picture data Dolby Vision and HDR10+ can provide - data that can significantly improve picture quality, especially on relatively affordable TVs. While both the PS5 and Xbox Series X can, of course, support the ‘baseline’ HDR10 high dynamic range format that all HDR-capable devices have to support, unfortunately neither console supports either of the two premium Dolby Vision or HDR10+ HDR formats now available on a wide range of 4K Blu-ray discs. The Xbox Series X and PS5 do, though, both support HD Blu-ray and DVD discs. Precious few standalone 4K Blu-ray players support these niche high-resolution music formats either. Neither the PS5 nor the Xbox Series X supports the premium audio SACD and DVD-Audio discs, but that’s only to be expected. Especially as it seems to have gone out of its way to actually remove a feature from the Series X that the Xbox One X supported.Īnyway, the bottom line is that while the Series X can ‘see’ 3D discs, it can’t currently play them on any display I’ve been able to find. Given 3D’s dwindling fortunes, though, there doesn’t honestly seem to be much incentive for Microsoft to deliver such an update. This possibly opens the door to 3D being addable to the Series X later via a firmware update.
So all I can think is that while the core drive and some level of the Series X’s disc playback software CAN handle 3D, support for it has been removed at some later stage in the Xbox’s signal ‘journey’. And no settings I could find on any 3D display managed to persuade the Series X that it was connected to a 3D display. There’s no option to select 3D as an output option in the Xbox Series X’s video menus like there was on the Xbox One X, though. So instead of an error telling you that your player is not 3D capable, like you get with the PS5, on the Series X you get an error message from the 3D disc saying, effectively, that ‘your 3D disc player doesn’t recognize that it’s connected to a 3D display’. However, the console can’t then recognize connected displays as being capable of playing 3D, even when they are. The thing is, its drive is actually recognized by 3D discs as being capable of playing 3D.