Has anyone ever seen a multichannel-audio icon for TV?

If you display the info OSD for TV or video, you can see some icons that indicate various properties of the programme being played. In particular, there is an icon for the number of audio channels. But this seems always to display as the "stereo" icon.

In the UK, the SD channels are stereo (although a very old film might have identical content on each stereo channel, i.e. mono). However, the HD channels are more interesting. Most are stereo, and for these my Sony TV displays this:

HE-AAC 2/0

But blockbuster films and prestige drama productions have multichannel sound. When I checked "Dr Who" yesterday, my Sony displayed this:

HE-AAC 3/2.1

Sadly, MP displays the stereo icon for this programme, both for live TV and recordings of it stored in "Videos". So, has anyone ever seen a multichannel audio icon for a TV programme? Perhaps this works correctly for other video formats, but not for TS files?

-- from CyberSimian in the UK

Aside: there seem to be several built-in skin variables that might be set to indicate the audio icon that is appropriate, but they are either "stereo" or the null string:

#AudioChannels
#Play.Current.Channels
#Play.Current.AudioChannels
#Play.Next.Channels

 

Recently I have been working on the OSDs for my "ClassicWide" skin, and I was trying to get a multichannel-audio icon to appear in the OSD, sadly without success. Look at the following screen shots, which use "DefaultWideHD"; they show:

(1) The list form of the "Videos" panel when listing multichannel TV recordings.
(2) The info OSD when playing a multichannel TV recording stored in "Videos".
(3) The info OSD when playing a multichannel TV recording stored in "Recorded TV".

Notice that the audio-channels icon (marked in red) is the "stereo" icon for (1) and (2), and is missing for (3). It is also missing for multichannel live TV (e.g. recent episodes of "The Simpsons").



The above show the "DefaultWideHD" skin, but "Ares" and "Titan" also exhibit these quirks. If you look in the folder "...\Skin\DefaultWideHD\Media\Logos\Audio\", you will notice that there are numerous logos for different numbers of audio channels (as well as for different audio encodings). Presumably, MP will use these logos for some video file formats, but apparently not for TS files.

Actually, what would be really useful would be to display the number of audio channels in the EPG, so that one could see which programmes had multichannel sound, and which had only stereo sound.

-- from CyberSimian in the UK

 

I have just been looking at the xml file for the logos in the video OSD ("common.logos.xml"), and there is a definition for the audio-channels logo, which corresponds to the gap in the line of logos in your screen shot. So "DefaultWideHD" is attempting to display the logo, but the MP client is being uncooperative.

For the TV OSD, the logos file is "tvosd.mediainfo.xml", and that does not attempt to display the number of audio channels (possibly @catavolt noticed that nothing appears, and decided to omit it).

I don't recollect seeing any logos in the "Recorded TV" folder (cannot check at the moment -- see below), but the "Videos" folder should show them. If you did not get any logos in your test, it may be because you defined the "Recorded TV" folder as a "Videos" folder too, but MP was smart enough to recognise that it was really the recorded TV folder. (Apologies if I have misunderstood the test that you performed.) If you copy a TV recording to the "Videos" folder (with the "Recorded TV" folder not defined as a "Video" folder too), do you get icons then?

The VLC file is interesting -- it demonstrates that MP will use logos other than "stereo" for some files. I would guess that when you edited the file, VLC either recoded the extracted portion, or prefixed the extracted portion with a header of its own. It may be that VLC is setting the specific audio-channels field in the header that the MP client is looking at, but that TV Server is not setting that field. But this is just speculation.

Finally, I am no longer in a position to test any of this, as when I woke up this morning my HTPC was completely dead. I tried a different power lead, but still nothing. So I think that the power supply has died. Unfortunately, my HTPC uses a case and motherboard that conform to the unloved (and short-lived) BTX standard, and not the ATX standard. If it requires a power-supply that also conforms to the BTX standard, I may be in for a hard time finding a replacement.

-- from CyberSimian in the UK

 

Thanks for the offer, but I want to repair my existing system if possible (it seems silly to scrap it for just one fault).

I was looking on the web yesterday, and it seems that the electrical interfaces of BTX are the same as ATX (same voltages, same connections). But it was less clear whether the physical dimensions are the same between ATX and BTX power supplies, so I will need to investigate that further. Meanwhile, I have resurrected my Humax DVR (an HDR-FOX-T2 -- twin tuners, HD, and a 1TB disk ).

-- from CyberSimian in the UK

 

So did you check if audio is multichannel with mediainfo? Any logs stating mp knows it's multichannel or thinks it's stereo?

Отправлено с моего Redmi 3S через Tapatalk

 

My Sony TV thinks that it is multichannel. But since my HTPC no longer works, and the recorded TV files are stored on its hard disk, I am not currently in a position to check what MediaInfo thinks.

-- from CyberSimian in the UK