2014-11-20, 22:43
I've been giving the last two builds a bit of testing over the last day or two and overall I like what I see - performance seems to be up considerably from Gotham. With 1Ghz overclock and NFS over UDP I can now stream and play back 1080p at 55Mbps compared to 45Mbps on Gotham. 
Menu and list navigation seems much snappier too.
I've noticed a number of issues with the sound however. I'm testing with analogue output with number of channels set to 2.0.
"Maintain original volume on downmix" has no effect on 5.1 audio mixed down to 2.0 like it does on other platforms. (Mac/Windows) This problem was actually there in Gotham as well, but only for OMXPlayer - DVDPlayer did boost the volume when turning off "Maintain original volume on downmix". However now that DVDPlayer and OMXPlayer are somewhat merged, it seems to have followed the behaviour of OMXPlayer, eg the setting is not doing anything.
The new "Boost centre channel when downmixing" is not working for me, I can turn it up to 20dB on a 5.1 channel file and notice no difference. This is the case with either setting of "maintain original volume on downmix".
"Play GUI sounds: always" is not working for me either - as soon as I start playing a video GUI sounds go silent, however if I change one of the sound settings such as "maintain original volume on downmix" WHILE the video is still playing I get an extremely loud distorted GUI click sound then after that the GUI sounds start working again while the video still plays, until I stop and play the next video then GUI sounds stop working again.
Sound quality through the analogue output is particularly poor verging on unusable on some videos that have quieter scenes, at least without using volume amplification in the OSD, although this was also the case with Gotham so I think it's more of a limitation of the Pi hardware than an xbmc problem. A good example is the opening minutes of Gravity where the quiet comms speech to the astronauts is completely obscured by noise and distortion and unintelligible but audible and clear with HDMI output or played through analogue on another platform like my Mac. I'm doing further testing with the analogue output to try to get a better idea of what's going on, although I suspect not many people use the Pi's analogue output with xbmc/kodi so not many may notice or care.
Output configuration and Resample quality don't have any bearing on any of the above issues.
Menu and list navigation seems much snappier too.I've noticed a number of issues with the sound however. I'm testing with analogue output with number of channels set to 2.0.
"Maintain original volume on downmix" has no effect on 5.1 audio mixed down to 2.0 like it does on other platforms. (Mac/Windows) This problem was actually there in Gotham as well, but only for OMXPlayer - DVDPlayer did boost the volume when turning off "Maintain original volume on downmix". However now that DVDPlayer and OMXPlayer are somewhat merged, it seems to have followed the behaviour of OMXPlayer, eg the setting is not doing anything.
The new "Boost centre channel when downmixing" is not working for me, I can turn it up to 20dB on a 5.1 channel file and notice no difference. This is the case with either setting of "maintain original volume on downmix".
"Play GUI sounds: always" is not working for me either - as soon as I start playing a video GUI sounds go silent, however if I change one of the sound settings such as "maintain original volume on downmix" WHILE the video is still playing I get an extremely loud distorted GUI click sound then after that the GUI sounds start working again while the video still plays, until I stop and play the next video then GUI sounds stop working again.
Sound quality through the analogue output is particularly poor verging on unusable on some videos that have quieter scenes, at least without using volume amplification in the OSD, although this was also the case with Gotham so I think it's more of a limitation of the Pi hardware than an xbmc problem. A good example is the opening minutes of Gravity where the quiet comms speech to the astronauts is completely obscured by noise and distortion and unintelligible but audible and clear with HDMI output or played through analogue on another platform like my Mac. I'm doing further testing with the analogue output to try to get a better idea of what's going on, although I suspect not many people use the Pi's analogue output with xbmc/kodi so not many may notice or care.
Output configuration and Resample quality don't have any bearing on any of the above issues.
