[Warner306]

Is the stock menu required, for this to work properly? As I get stuttering of the menu after i start and stop a few movies...


@meles,
I am not as into this topic as it may have sounded like, but lets just recap everything. First of all, I recommend watching these videos by the awesome folks at xiph.org first, as I will not explain why things are the way things are:
https://xiph.org/video/vid1.shtml and https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml

The human ear can hear up to 20kHz with very few exceptions. If you want to store 20kHz of analogue audio digitally without any loss, you need to at least double the sampling rate, thus 40kHz or more (Nyquist Theorem). Both CD audio (44.1kHz) and DVD/Bluray audio (48kHz) do cover the full range of the human ear, plus some extra. Most speakers and headphones are only capable of reproducing that range (~20Hz-22kHz). Now if you set up your audio card to output 96kHz and actually send analogue audio above 22kHz, you will actually hear something, as the speakers will vibrate at an unintended lower and hearable frequency. Now if you had some of those pointless fidelity 96kHz and above songs, and will listen to them on those speakers, it will certainly sound different compared to the CD-quality counterpart, as they will be distorted and not sound the way they are intended to sound. If you want to listen to the 96+kHz songs without distortion, you need to get extremely expensive speakers, capable of reproducing those frequencies, only to discover, that it sounds just like the CD on your old system.
As for the bitdepth: 32bit is floating point and is only used for mixing. The end result will be integer, either 16bit or 24bit. Audio cards do not support 32bit at all. It just gets converted to 24bit first and then handled by the card for analogue conversion. Simple as that.

As for truehd, dtshd and flac: they are nothing more than losslessly compressed PCM audio. no fancy magic here. They sound the same, just take less space on your harddrive/blurays.AC3, MP3, Opus and so on are lossy. They do not store the whole original PCM sample, but loose information in order to reduce the filesize. If the bitrate is still high enough, you probably cannot hear a difference to its lossless cousin.
Decoding these audioformats with a compatible decoder/filter will result in PCM audio. Unless the decoder is buggy or not following the specifications, all decoders should result in the same PCM. the only difference between them should be performance/efficiency. Same goes for video as well, but this is more complicated (see deblocking).

If you have an av or stereo receiver, you should just output PCM (or encoded formats like TrueHD, if supported) and let the receiver handle the digital to analogue conversion. ATI HD Audio Device is probably the HDMI output of your laptop and that is always digital, not analog.

As for your vinyl collection: I also own a record player (Pioneer PL-550) and vinyls, though I still wouldn't digitize them at 96kHz. Just take a look at the specifications of the needle you are using. It's frequency range should be at around Human hearing, so just 20Hz to 22kHz. Extremely expensive ones might go up to 30kHz, but yeah, nothing beyond that. If you record at 96kHz, you are just wasting storage space... 48kHz should be plenty here as well. I recommend resampling them to 48kHz if you are running low on storage!

Personally, I set my soundcard to 24bit 48kHz for line out, line in and microphone. It can handle 96kHz as well, by my soundsystem and ears certainly cannot xD

P.S. Not sure where the article looses credibility, as I did not read anything contradictory. Please point it out
Though, I do recommend you do some blind listening tests online to check how good your ears are:
http://www.audiocheck.net/blindtests_frequency.php check your hearing frequency. I can handle distinguish up to 18-19kHz, depending on the time of day (it tends to be best in the morning!)
http://www.audiocheck.net/blindtests_level.php? check how well you distinguish loudness. 1db is my limit apparently.
Use headphones!

The laggy menu is a bug. It hasn't been dealt with as of yet. I will see if it is still present the next DSPlayer build, which should be out shortly.

[meles]

@meles,
I am not as into this topic as it may have sounded like, but lets just recap everything. First of all, I recommend watching these videos by the awesome folks at xiph.org first, as I will not explain why things are the way things are:
https://xiph.org/video/vid1.shtml and https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml

...

P.S. Not sure where the article looses credibility, as I did not read anything contradictory. Please point it out
Though, I do recommend you do some blind listening tests online to check how good your ears are:
....
Use headphones!

A friend of mine has been going through the higher end headphones, but thankfully not the most expensive headphone amps. He has backed off from the craze somewhat (sold a $2000 model he bought used and prefers his big rig, but often he cannot listen so headphones are great for him. Stereo, home theatre sound, is not going to image in the same way with headphones. I have a moderate priced Seinheiser closed back that I use and I do enjoy it for what it is and don't have a problem with headphones, I just blast as loud as I want whenever I want to on my big rig, so don't have as much use for them. In principal I believe great headphone setups have an advantage over great stereo/home theatre setups in that the sound is likely going through less amplifications stages for headphones. I am not really into headphones, but I am dabbling because even out of my ipad and hp envy laptop the headphones are serviceable. It also uses a lot less power than a big stereo system.

I need to study closely all of these sources and then listen for myself. I definitely like 24 bit over 16 bit. I don't like blind tests as it is often very hard to distinguish differences in the shorter periods used for these tests. I am not really into debating the science, but I know when I am considering some change whether in video or audio I find the seeming luxury of switching back and forth a lot less telling overall, then staying with something for 20 minutes and then going back. On some differences that are more clear I might rush this in five minutes. To me these nuances do begin to add up and you don't want to choose poorly.

DACs do make a difference of course. It seems with hdmi that the licensing is pricey enough that hardly anyone bothers with hdmi DACs. I am sure each large receiver manufacturer has their unique solutions, but it seems sadly limited compared to pure audio dacs. I am guessing when I say I suppose my pc uses a DAC. It is perplexing to me that I and other listeners of my system hear three distinct sounds between FFDshow raw audio, Kodi audio engine, and LAV audio. I want to understand what is going on better and make sure that having my speakers and headphone properpties on 192khz 24 bit is not causing these three to react differently and transmit differently to the Envy's DAC.

On the video front, I've not compared exhaustively, but I don't see earth shaking differences between LAV video and FFdshow raw video with both setups running madvr and reclock. (Saw a huge difference when I lost my dsplayer settings and Kodi was not using madvr and reclock, as the video really fell off a cliff in quality.) I watched my pioneer bdp51fd bluray player last night and it looks very interesting (hadn't seen it since calibrating tv), but after watching for a while it did not seem to have the magic involvement of the dsplayer Kodi. I need to come up with a high quality file to compare with one of my numerous blurays. I guess the ultimate would be to play a blu ray copy from the hard drive. I am not sure if Kodi DSplayer does that, but I think there is a way to go about it with much of these video components that the Ezoden ultimate HTPC site mentions (links in previous posts.) My blu-ray drive is due for replacement in my laptop and I may have to start burning some of my library to hard drive if I go totally mad(vr)!

[Ceremony]

I meant with "use headphones" to just use them for the hearing tests, as its much more accurate than using speakers. Btw, I cannot hear the difference between 16 and 24bit and I somewhat doubt anyone actually can, however, why waste performance dithering 24bit down to 16bit... So 24bit it is. Also, unlike frequency, the bits per sample cannot be harmful to your listening experience!

The point of "blind tests" is to stay unbiased and just judge what you can actually hear, not what you believe you can hear. By no means do they have to be short. You can easily create your own ABX tests and such. Foobar2000 for example has an ABX plugin. Also, the longer you do tests or listen to something, the harder it gets to hear a difference.

Nobody does DACs for HDMI, as HDMI supports more than just PCM audio. Licensing decoding support of various formats would be expensive, and if they wouldn't do that, thered be compatibility issues with customers who dont know what they are doing. "simple" usb and PCI/PCIe soundcards let the PC handle decoding and only accept PCM audio. So the only difference between them is the DAC onboard. If your PC had no DAC, you'd have no analogue audio. DAC stands for Digital-to-analog converter after all!

Again FFDshow raw audio is not decoding anything. It allows you to filter, mix channels and whatnot, but it doesn't do anything to the audio if all filters are disabled. Same goes for ffdshow raw video. Not a decoder. I guess your system codecs or kodi is handling the decoding in the ffdshow raw cases. otherwise, you would have no audio or visuals at all!
Decoding using Kodi or LAV/ffmpeg doesn't make any difference to the audio or the quality, unless they do more than just decode (such as resampling, dynamic recompression or mixing).

Before you force 192kHz or anything above 44.1kHz, check the specs sheet of your speakers and headphones. If the supported rang is 22kHz or more, 44.1kHz is for you, past 24kHz go with 48kHz, 48kHz stick to 96kHz tops and if it does up to 96kHz frequency response, set your audio card to 192kHz. I highly doubt your speakers or headphones go past 30kHz. Also, they don't do these frequencies for a reason: We cannot hear them!
If you force 192kHz on speakers that dont support these high frequencies and play some 192kHz content, you will have major interference and distortion. The xiph.org pages had some tracks with just sounds above our hearing range. If you can hear anything on those, you configured it incorrectly!

P.S. ripping/copying blurays is a pain, all thx to shitty sony and its drm bullshit. Not gonna explain how to do it, but let me just say this: Its annoying!

[TMDaines]

Please see here and the next couple of posts. The Starter Kit config files do not appear to have XySubFilter set as the subs filter for many of the media rules, despite the initial posts stating that the Starter Kit config files are configured for LAV and XYSubFilter.

[Warner306]

Please see here and the next couple of posts. The Starter Kit config files do not appear to have XySubFilter set as the subs filter for many of the media rules, despite the initial posts stating that the Starter Kit config files are configured for LAV and XYSubFilter.

Sorry, that was a major mistake made two weeks ago. The Starter Kit files have been amended with the correct filters.

[TMDaines]

Thanks for the quick correct! The files are much appreciated.

[meles]

Quick note that the Kodi volume amplification feature seems to be inactive with dsplayer. Volume does function and might gain back some volume by setting it up to 0 db. For dolby truehd and dtshd playback on laptop speakers its a bit low (not really a big deal), but for some users with headphones they might have volume issues.

Got a 17gb download of star trek with dolby truehd to compare with my Pioneer BDP51FD Bluray player. The Pioneer is not considered as good as an Oppo, but its very respected and also has very good two channel audio, surround etc. with its Wolfson DAC. I expect the 17gb file has half the bit rate of the Bluray (any way to show video bitrate dsplayer?) The Pioneer had a very detailed picture that was impressive in its own way, but over long term viewing it was clear that the DSplayer was infinitely better. It was much more film like with incredible smoothness to the video. The video was simply very engaging. (Technically I compared using both LAV video and FFDshow Raw Video which are very, very close when both are using the same reclock and madvr settings.) The audio results were a complete surprise. I have standard audio jacks and hot rodded audio jacks (direct from wolfson DAC) on the Pioneer. Amazingly, even the inferior FFDShow HD audio in my supped up MPC-HC setup easily bested the hotrodded Pioneer. Amazing, but again this is the performance via the headphone jack on my laptop. I am getting my bluray drive repaired on my laptop and will try burning a backup of the star trek bluray to disk once this is done. For HD Audio and Video DSPlayer with LAV is king of the headphone/two channel world. (Wish dsplayer existed for IOS/ipad because ipad has stunning audio and amazing video quality.)

The bummer with all this is that DSPlayer with either confluence or the retouched skin is thrashing my HTPC laptop. I am getting the madvr renderer display showing frame drops every ten minutes with reality being glitches every 10 seconds. Any tricks/tweaks on settings or skins to take the pressure off? (I am ending task on all my google stuff to make sure nothing else is taking resources, otherwise Kodi can really lockup and start putting my poorly cooled laptop into thermal overload with the cpu slowing down due to high temp.) By the way I think the dolby truehd soundtrack in Star Trek is definitely making things even worse.

[Warner306]

Quick note that the Kodi volume amplification feature seems to be inactive with dsplayer. Volume does function and might gain back some volume by setting it up to 0 db. For dolby truehd and dtshd playback on laptop speakers its a bit low (not really a big deal), but for some users with headphones they might have volume issues.

Got a 17gb download of star trek with dolby truehd to compare with my Pioneer BDP51FD Bluray player. The Pioneer is not considered as good as an Oppo, but its very respected and also has very good two channel audio, surround etc. with its Wolfson DAC. I expect the 17gb file has half the bit rate of the Bluray (any way to show video bitrate dsplayer?) The Pioneer had a very detailed picture that was impressive in its own way, but over long term viewing it was clear that the DSplayer was infinitely better. It was much more film like with incredible smoothness to the video. The video was simply very engaging. (Technically I compared using both LAV video and FFDshow Raw Video which are very, very close when both are using the same reclock and madvr settings.) The audio results were a complete surprise. I have standard audio jacks and hot rodded audio jacks (direct from wolfson DAC) on the Pioneer. Amazingly, even the inferior FFDShow HD audio in my supped up MPC-HC setup easily bested the hotrodded Pioneer. Amazing, but again this is the performance via the headphone jack on my laptop. I am getting my bluray drive repaired on my laptop and will try burning a backup of the star trek bluray to disk once this is done. For HD Audio and Video DSPlayer with LAV is king of the headphone/two channel world. (Wish dsplayer existed for IOS/ipad because ipad has stunning audio and amazing video quality.)

The bummer with all this is that DSPlayer with either confluence or the retouched skin is thrashing my HTPC laptop. I am getting the madvr renderer display showing frame drops every ten minutes with reality being glitches every 10 seconds. Any tricks/tweaks on settings or skins to take the pressure off? (I am ending task on all my google stuff to make sure nothing else is taking resources, otherwise Kodi can really lockup and start putting my poorly cooled laptop into thermal overload with the cpu slowing down due to high temp.) By the way I think the dolby truehd soundtrack in Star Trek is definitely making things even worse.

I can't recommend any specific madVR settings to ease your load, but you can try to reduce them. Reduce the chroma upscaling algorithm, use Ordered dithering instead or Error Diffusion, and lastly, check some of the trade quality for performance checkboxes. Those three settings will have minimal impact on picture quality.

[Ceremony]

image doubling and jinc is very demanding as well, so I'd recommend sticking to bicubic upsampling for entry and midrange cards. also, DX11 might introduce some issues, as it is anything but stable yet.

[TMDaines]

Anyone else have an issue with Reclock not correctly identifying the frame rate for mkv files?

When you open Reclock properties when playing an mkv, it always says "No video stream found" and therefore the frame rate can obviously not be identified. You would think there would be a fix for this, but upon Googling it seems that dozens of people have had this issue over the years and there has never been any real answer. Some claim deleting registry entries can help, others suggest reinstalling, but nothing is working for me.

[Ceremony]

Sounds like reclock is not getting the info of the video stream from the filter chain. As to how to fix it: No clue. I'd approach it by going back to the basics and play with mpc first. Do a minimal setup with it (use included filters of mpc) and reclock as the audio interface. If that works, add the filters you are planing to use one by one, until it fails: analyze at that point. if it already fails from the start, check if its really using the included filters and not some system filters that may interfere. Remove or block them within mpc and try again.

Once you know what to do, you can do the same in Kodi, however, blocking filters is not possible as far as i know, so you may need to remove them.

[meles]

Thanks for everyone's help. I've not had issues with reclock. I am running madvr and reclock both with mpc-hc and Kodi, so the only difference is the video and audio codecs. I think I will optimize sound playback of HD audio movies for MPC-HC and have Kodi do everything else with FFDshow audio which has been killer with for nonHD audio material for two channel headphone, etc. listening (this will include most tv shows for which the a media server interface is indespensible.) My problem may follow me with the audio codec and if so I'll report back. Right now the HD Star Trek file has trouble when doing dolby truehd with Kodi, with the lower quality commentary track this Kodi combination has no problems.

[TMDaines]

Sounds like reclock is not getting the info of the video stream from the filter chain. As to how to fix it: No clue. I'd approach it by going back to the basics and play with mpc first. Do a minimal setup with it (use included filters of mpc) and reclock as the audio interface. If that works, add the filters you are planing to use one by one, until it fails: analyze at that point. if it already fails from the start, check if its really using the included filters and not some system filters that may interfere. Remove or block them within mpc and try again.

Once you know what to do, you can do the same in Kodi, however, blocking filters is not possible as far as i know, so you may need to remove them.

I think I solved it!

Turning on "Use system filters (DirectShow merits)" lead to Reclock finding the video stream for all my files, which suggested it was indeed a filters issue. Also using MPC-HC's internal filters for MKV lead to Reclock finding the video stream for all my files when played in MPC-HC.

After an hour or so of changing different MKV-related settings in the LAV filters' menus, switching the Hardware Decoder in LAV Video from "Intel QuickSync" to "DXVA2 (copy-back)" has seemingly solved the problem!

I guess this begs the question: why is "Intel QuickSync" recommended over "DXVA2 (copy-back)" for Intel users in this guide? Am I potentially missing out on anything by making this switch?

[Warner306]

Sounds like reclock is not getting the info of the video stream from the filter chain. As to how to fix it: No clue. I'd approach it by going back to the basics and play with mpc first. Do a minimal setup with it (use included filters of mpc) and reclock as the audio interface. If that works, add the filters you are planing to use one by one, until it fails: analyze at that point. if it already fails from the start, check if its really using the included filters and not some system filters that may interfere. Remove or block them within mpc and try again.

Once you know what to do, you can do the same in Kodi, however, blocking filters is not possible as far as i know, so you may need to remove them.

I think I solved it!

Turning on "Use system filters (DirectShow merits)" lead to Reclock finding the video stream for all my files, which suggested it was indeed a filters issue. Also using MPC-HC's internal filters for MKV lead to Reclock finding the video stream for all my files when played in MPC-HC.

After an hour or so of changing different MKV-related settings in the LAV filters' menus, switching the Hardware Decoder in LAV Video from "Intel QuickSync" to "DXVA2 (copy-back)" has seemingly solved the problem!

I guess this begs the question: why is "Intel QuickSync" recommended over "DXVA2 (copy-back)" for Intel users in this guide? Am I potentially missing out on anything by making this switch?

QuickSync will give you lower render times than DXVA2 (copy-back). If you can point me to a link that says QuickSync is not a great choice for Intel processors, I would change it in the guide.

[TMDaines]

OK, looks like I will have to pass on that advantage to have Reclock working properly.