Solved! Receiving ARC audio output from the TV and sending video to the TV with one HDMI cable?

[markvadeika]

My home TV setup is a bit unusual making modifications difficult. My TV is wall-mounted in the front of the room and all of the A/V equipment is in the back. The cables running from the back of the room to the TV and speakers are all run through the walls, so adding new cables would not be easy. Here is an artful diagram of my current setup:

There are a few obvious problems with how everything is constructed now, but the most relevant issue to my question here is that any audio that the TV itself generates cannot be sent over the speakers. I currently have an older TV without any "smart" capabilities, but I will soon be getting a newer one which does. If I want to use the built-in applications such as YouTube or Netflix, I will be forced to use the TV's speakers. The obvious solution to the problem is running an audio cable from the TV's output to the speakers directly, but since running any new cables would be quite difficult, I'd prefer to avoid that.

ARC seems to be the easiest solution, as it allows video to be sent to the TV and audio to be sent back using the one cable. Typically this would be used by running the video cable through an A/V receiver or soundbar, but I don't have either of those in my setup. What I wanted to do was get an ARC audio extractor like this one, but none that I have found support sending the video through the device to the TV and receiving ARC audio at the same time.

TLDR: I want to output all audio from the TV (both TV-generated audio and audio from other sources) to my sound system in the back of the room using one HDMI cable while also sending video to the TV.

 

[americanaudiophile]

The simple solution is to replace the HDMI and audio switches with an AV receiver (or preamp processor). Now you have HDMI ARC and combined audio and video switching. You can also use sources that don't have analog audio outputs.
Plan B would be to use an streamer with analog audio output rather than the built in TV apps. That would be one of your sources.

 

[markvadeika]

The simple solution is to replace the HDMI and audio switches with an AV receiver (or preamp processor). Now you have HDMI ARC and combined audio and video switching. You can also use sources that don't have analog audio outputs.
Plan B would be to use an streamer with analog audio output rather than the built in TV apps. That would be one of your sources.

Yeah that would be the easier route but I would like to avoid having to purchase a whole A/V receiver when it would otherwise be unneeded. I feel like there must be some product which just has this one function. I'll keep looking but short of running an audio cable from the TV all of the way to the back of the room or some wireless solution, that's probably the way to go.