MediaPortal Audio renderer - better video playback quality (4 Viewers)

[tourettes]

Just a quick note, MediaPortal Audio Renderer development has been woken up from the long hibernate period - actually that happened almost few months ago. We have been making good progress with some architecture refactoring (done) and with some new features. I'm hoping that we could release a sneak preview in

A small tease...

• Pipeline for allowing more easy development of future features. A bit like having directshow inside a directshow filter
• Instant resume for audio when resuming from paused state (was not possible without the new pipeline architecture)
• Audio resampling - either automatically or by forced to a specific sampling rate
• Bit depth conversions - either automatically or by forced to a specific bit depth
• Automatic speaker format negotiation (Xonar users shouldn't have to worry about having manually to edit the registry)
• A channel mixer - allows forced or automatic channel format conversions
• Many smaller details that I have already forgotten...

Three of those features (channel mixer, bit depth converter and sample rate converter) are now allowing people to use anay audio decoder and not to be limit to the ffdshow.

 

[doveman]

Hey tourettes

Sounds good Will the channel mixer allow for on-the-fly changing from 5.1 to mixed-to-stereo by the user? If so, that would be awesome and save having to mess around with ARC and ffdshow profiles.

 

[wouter1971]

Hi Tourettes, great to see that you picked up developing mpaudiorenderer. Have been using it for a long time now.
If you need beta testers, i think we all would like to help out.
Greetings, Wouter

 

[peque]

Question: is it possible to use MP Audio Renderer ONLY for TV? Will modified dshowhelper.dll work ok without it for Videos or DVD section?

Thanks a lot!

 

[Jay_UK]

hi there,

Cant you just specify it as the renderer under the TV codec section?

I believe the DLL will work fine without it.

J.

 

[peque]

hi there,

Cant you just specify it as the renderer under the TV codec section?

I believe the DLL will work fine without it.

J.

That's exactly what I've done... My question is just to confirm that this dshowhelper can work without MPAR...

 

[tourettes]

hi there,

Cant you just specify it as the renderer under the TV codec section?

I believe the DLL will work fine without it.

J.

That's exactly what I've done... My question is just to confirm that this dshowhelper can work without MPAR...

dshowhelper will work normally if the MPAR is not in the graph - there is runtime detection for the MPAR.

 

[peque]

Good!

I'm currently testing what you suggested in dshowhelper thread: I've got rid of passthrough, and use ffdshow audio decoder + MPAR for livetv... First 2 hours seem really promising... I was having a rate of 1 drop every 3000 frames and that drift in render time for 1080i livetv broadcast... Now, after two hours and 300k frames displayed, I'm under 30 dropped frames. Also drift in render time is much less (I've been able to see them in first 10-30 seconds after zapping, and after, very sporadic).

Just one question... I'm able to send multichannel uncompressed audio to AVR (I'm using Nvidia HDMI audio out), so I really don't lose surround of 5.1 AC3 audio pids (tested and working, I asume because of WASAPI)... BUT... Do stereo DD+ audio pids contain any kind of surround info that I could lose decoding them before sending to my AVR, instead of letting the AVR do the job?

Thanks a lot, and sorry for going a little offtopic...

 

[tourettes]

A sneak to the new pipeline architecture based renderer. It is starting to near the 1st public test build, only few issues that we like to get sorted out.

Here's a screen shot from Blu-ray playback with LAV audio decoder (playback had been running for a bit over two hours at that point)

• Forced sample rate conversion to 96000 hz
• Timestretch to match the 50 Hz display mode
• Forced AC3 encoding
• Forced channel down mixing to stereo

No dropped or repeated video frames and no dropped audio samples...

 

[tourettes]

Sounds good Will the channel mixer allow for on-the-fly changing from 5.1 to mixed-to-stereo by the user? If so, that would be awesome and save having to mess around with ARC and ffdshow profiles.

Currently there is no plans to add on-the-fly changes as it is quite small amount of peopel who would actually benefit from such and it is not a small thing to do (althou the pipeline architecture allows it to be implemented in the future).

It will be possible to switch the 5.1 to stereo by changing one registry value between different video files - it might be enough for some use cases (it would require some plugin or remote command to access the registry...).