Got Media Portal Running with DTS and AC3 Sound (1 Viewer)

Vermi

Portal Member
February 28, 2009
5
1
Home Country
Denmark Denmark
Have had a problem for quite some time after i upgraded to media portal 1.02
Some of my mkv files could not play properly, either the sound was making all kinds of wierd noises or the video and sound was out of sync.
Again this was only on some of the movies, might be the quality of the rip or some kind of techical mumbo jumbo.
I finally had enough and decided to go ahead and fix this.
Now what i want working perfectly is these things:
My Videos: I have only HD films here, exept for conan films that arent in HD :p, i need to have DTS working perfectly and AC3, i have invested the money in really good sound and when i have the sound hardware as all true Home Theater guys should have, i bloody well want it to work.
My Trailers: its just great witht the new plugin, you can watch game trailers aswell as film trailers
My TV Series: Tv shows right ? :D
My Music: Havent really got around to optimizing this plugin, alot of organizing mp3's work before this will work.

Oh well enough BS.

Steps:
1 Install Media Portal 1.02
2 Install Core AVC Professional newest version, go buy it at their Homepage : CoreAVC.com: World's Fastest High Definition H.264 Video Software Decoder
3 Install AC3 Filter AC3Filter | AC3Filter
Set it to pass through DTS sound and set it to padded dts under the SPDIF Banner uncheck passtrough AC3 and uncheck encode AC3, obviously set it to use SPDIF.
4 Install FFDShow Free-Codecs.com : Download FFDShow MPEG-4 Video Decoder 2009-06-14, FFDShow MPEG-4 Video Decoder 2009-06-06 and FFDShow MPEG-4 Video Decoder 2009-05-26 SSE : FFDSHOW is a DirectShow decoding filter Set FDD show to only Decode AC3 Sound And set it to not Decode hx264 videos or any other mkv files
5 Install DirectVobSub Free-Codecs.com :: DirectVobSub 2.39 : DirectVobSub is simply a DirectShow filter which can be used to display subtitle
6 Install Real Alternative Free-Codecs.com :: Download Real Alternative 1.90 : Real Alternative will allow you to play RealMedia files without having to install RealPlayer/RealOne Player
7 Install Quicktime Directshow Filter Free-Codecs.com : QuickTime Alternative 2.9.0 : QuickTime Alternative will allow you to play QuickTime files (.mov, .qt and other extensions) without having to install the official QuickTime Player.

In Media Portal Configuration set it to use the following codecs:
Mpeg-2: fddshow
hx264: AVC
AC3: fddshow
AAC: fddshow
Device: default directsound device

Everything else is at default


Thats pretty much it, think i have used around 10 hours figuring this simple solution out, figured out that SAF codec pack or whatever you wanna call it was causing the problems, tbh i dont really get why you would make a codec pack that is not for outputting DTS and AC3 Sound, that really makes no sense at all.
Forget power DVD aswell, really no use when you have AVC codec, couldnt get the sound to work properly when using just one of the two audio codecs, so opted to go with 2 instead, just make sure you go into fddshow and configure the codec to passthrough AC3 Sound through SPDIF i think its in general settings.
Good luck, this really made my day when i figured this out, i just thought well at least somewhere out there there are people just as frustrated as i am. I will update this when i have checked if all my 250 + mkv films have been checked but currently i have checked the 10 mkv's that have been given me problems in the past and they all work perfectly and in perfect sync.

My System specs are
2,4 Ghz Dual core Intel
2gb RAM
Radeon 4500 or something
Sound Card Sound Blaster XI-FI 5.1 Sorround

Not a really high tech machine, but in my experience 9 out of 10 times it is software causing problems and not the hardware.
Not a really high tech machine or anything.
First post here so excuse me if it is a little messy, not really the big forum shark here.
 

ScaryBob

Portal Member
March 25, 2007
27
0
London, Canada
Home Country
Canada Canada
I find that all you need for most things are Haali Media Splitter, ffdshow and CoreAVC. ffdshow has just about every audio and video codec except H.264, which requires CoreAVC. Haali handles some wrappers that ffdshow doesn't. Some people use the H.264 Power DVD8 codec from the PDVD8 trial instead of CoreAVC. Haali is included with CoreAVC but can be downloaded separately.

You Might also want to check out SAF in this thread.
 

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