v17 DTS music playback from WavPack (.wv) files
#31
Quote:How did I create the .wv files: I had those tracks as .waw and simply converted them with dBpoweramp into .wv. The only reason for doing this was to be able to tag them properly with Mp3tag, like the other .flac and (some) .mp3 music files I have, and have them included in the music library.

^^ Yeah - that's insane.

Quote:Out of curiosity I tried changing the volume in Kodi (what fritsch suggested) and the sound did indeed stop. I did not hear any noise, though, was just silent. Interestingly, pressing the "+" button (max volume again) the sound came back and was normal (multi-channel), probably because at max volume there's no internal processing involved.

You have luck :-). On my system (Denox 1300W) I got the noise until maxing up to 1.0 - DTS continued.
First decide what functions / features you expect from a system. Then decide for the hardware. Don't waste your money on crap.
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#32
(2017-01-03, 19:01)fritsch Wrote: Besides the technical details ... I hope no one will ever listen to such a file via headphones ...

That would not make much sense, would it? Laugh
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#33
How would user know what is in the file? What about a stranger that downloads the links above? See this is the big problem here: A container and totally not known what data is in there, without the wv giving any hint about the bitstream. That's the danger, the harm the insanity ... and that's why I rather say: if it works, it works - but we don't support it.

Edit: In the wav, we find DTS correctly and know about it. So we can easily decode and output.
First decide what functions / features you expect from a system. Then decide for the hardware. Don't waste your money on crap.
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#34
(2017-01-04, 16:19)fritsch Wrote: How would user know what is in the file? What about a stranger that downloads the links above? See this is the big problem here: A container and totally not known what data is in there, without the wv giving any hint about the bitstream. That's the danger, the harm the insanity ... and that's why I rather say: if it works, it works - but we don't support it.

Edit: In the wav, we find DTS correctly and know about it. So we can easily decode and output.

Hmmm... I really did not want to start a format war with this post but, as I mentioned earlier, this was working for me since I started to use Kodi (XBMC) many years ago. The big problem with .waw files is that they do not support tags so are not scanned into the music library. That was at least my experience and the reason I converted them to .wv. Did this change? Is there a way to have .waw files included in the Kodi music library?

Or... Is there a way to have all sound output as passthrough? In which case it wouldn't matter what is in the audio files as decoding would always be done by the AVR.
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#35
It still works. There is nothing, absolutley nothing changed. As long as you don't touch your volume -> all fine. It was never different.
First decide what functions / features you expect from a system. Then decide for the hardware. Don't waste your money on crap.
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#36
If this works for you, then by all means do use it. It's seem your receiver also detects what is "probably an encoded signal" and then automatically mutes the volume, so that gives you an extra security layer.

A similar problem manifests when playing DSD files; DoP (DSD over PCM) is basically sent as 24/176 pcm (for DSD64) but the 8 MSB are unused so the signal will always be -48db. Lately DAC's are beginning to support "native DSD" , which are sent as 32/88 and upwards. (It is twice as effective as DoP) Here the whole datapath is used for DSD data, but since there is no way for the DAC to signal this capability, the VID/PID of the device has to be hardcoded into ALSA itself.
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#37
I will definitely continue using these .wv files as they are so convenient...Nod

But could you also answer my other question: is there a way to force all sound output as passthrough? I was looking into the settings and into what you could set in advancedsettings.xml, and found nothing. But maybe I overlooked something...Blush
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#38
I always convert DTS music to FLAC which can be tagged and used in Kodi without problems. I'm not sure how you are converting DTS to .wv but I'd suggest there's no extra effort to convert to FLAC unless the audio is DTS-HDMA which is a two step process for me. (Decrypting the bluray then converting to FLAC - but you probably need a two step process to get .wv too, right?)
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#39
(2017-01-07, 08:36)hugo57 Wrote: I will definitely continue using these .wv files as they are so convenient...Nod

But could you also answer my other question: is there a way to force all sound output as passthrough? I was looking into the settings and into what you could set in advancedsettings.xml, and found nothing. But maybe I overlooked something...Blush

No there is not.
First decide what functions / features you expect from a system. Then decide for the hardware. Don't waste your money on crap.
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#40
(2017-01-07, 10:02)HomerJau Wrote: I always convert DTS music to FLAC which can be tagged and used in Kodi without problems. I'm not sure how you are converting DTS to .wv but I'd suggest there's no extra effort to convert to FLAC unless the audio is DTS-HDMA which is a two step process for me. (Decrypting the bluray then converting to FLAC - but you probably need a two step process to get .wv too, right?)

Never ever listen to them on headphones ... but yeah - cannot do anything else than warning to do such things. Good luck.
First decide what functions / features you expect from a system. Then decide for the hardware. Don't waste your money on crap.
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#41
(2017-01-07, 11:07)fritsch Wrote:
(2017-01-07, 08:36)hugo57 Wrote: I will definitely continue using these .wv files as they are so convenient...Nod

But could you also answer my other question: is there a way to force all sound output as passthrough? I was looking into the settings and into what you could set in advancedsettings.xml, and found nothing. But maybe I overlooked something...Blush

No there is not.

I understand... Would it be possible to add this into Kodi? Big Grin

You mentioned before that if the DTS stream is in a .waw file Kodi can detect this and tries to open the passthrough sink. This made me thinking: with a tag like <forcepassthrough> in the <audio> section of advancedsettings.xml it should not be very complicated to make Kodi always open the PT sink instead of a normal audio output device. Passthrough makes sense only if the HTPC is connected to an AVR and I assume AVRs would have no issue decoding and playing FLAC or MP3 streams they receive as bitstreams via passthrough.

Obviously this might not be useful or even working at all for everybody but I am pretty sure it would make a big number of users happy...
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#42
When I realize I have made a mistake, I do not hesitate to admit it. So, I admit that I was wrong when I said that AVRs decode Dolby Digital/DTS audio sent as linear PCM by accident. I had raised this question before, but never followed up on it: http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=...id=2149413

@Soli’s comment that it has worked on AVRs since the LaserDisc era made me look into the standards from that time. Indeed, the pre-1997 IEC958 standard have references about this. It has also been described in Annex B of A/52 (1995). Reference to this has since been removed from A/52. There is still a short reference to this in IEC-61937-1 under sec. 6.3.3 Burst spacing (which I seem to have overlooked although I have gone through the standards several times).

In short, this works by looking for Dolby Digital/DTS sync codes (Pa and Pb which are now part of the burst-preamble of IEC 61937).
Dolby Digital sync code – 0xF872, 0x4E1F (32-bit)
DTS sync code – 0x7FFE8001 / 0x3F (32/38-bit)
You can reduce the false detection rate by including the four “0” subframes in the burst-spacing along with Pa and Pb to form an extended 96-bit sync code.

(2017-01-03, 00:56)Soli Wrote: It's not an accident AVRs decode bitstream content even though they stream is flagged as linear pcm.
If all modern day AVRs did this, how do you explain why these users are getting noise with this “PCM Passthrough”? Some of them could be user errors (volume control), but I don’t think all of them are user errors. As mentioned in Annex D of IEC 60958-1, this doesn’t conform to 60958 standards and it is up to the vendor to implement this “fail-safe” option for linear PCM vs non-linear PCM audio detection.

http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=...pid2419995
http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=...pid2457364
http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=...pid2420652
http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=...id=2248752
http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=...pid2242081
http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=...pid2233494
http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=...pid2234479
http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=...pid2203068
http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=...pid2202047
http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=...pid2189107
http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=...pid2189156
http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=...pid2184950
http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=...pid2182566
http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=...pid2170080
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#43
Just to clarify, DTS is a lossy format. If you convert to flac, .wv or whatever, you're converting to a lossless format. That is the same as converting mp3 to flac etc. : A cardinal sin. As long as you do this for your own inscrutable purposes, no harm done - but please never ever distribute such files. Btw, foobar2000 can directly tag .dts, .wavdts and .wav.
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#44
(2017-01-14, 17:41)HeresJohnny Wrote: Just to clarify, DTS is a lossy format. If you convert to flac, .wv or whatever, you're converting to a lossless format. That is the same as converting mp3 to flac etc. : A cardinal sin. As long as you do this for your own inscrutable purposes, no harm done - but please never ever distribute such files. Btw, foobar2000 can directly tag .dts, .wavdts and .wav.

Indeed, DTS is a lossy format. But, I think, DTS in a .wav file is just as misleading as DTS in .flac or .wv or whatever other supposedly lossless container as .wav, as far as I know, is supposed to be the uncompressed digital file (therefore lossless). A .dts extension would make it clearer that this is supposed to be a DTS audio file.

Do you know if Kodi would recognize the tags maintained with foobar2000 in .dts (or .wav) files and scan them into the library? Only then would it make sense to do it, at least to me...
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#45
(2017-01-08, 07:57)hugo57 Wrote:
(2017-01-07, 11:07)fritsch Wrote:
(2017-01-07, 08:36)hugo57 Wrote: I will definitely continue using these .wv files as they are so convenient...Nod

But could you also answer my other question: is there a way to force all sound output as passthrough? I was looking into the settings and into what you could set in advancedsettings.xml, and found nothing. But maybe I overlooked something...Blush

No there is not.

I understand... Would it be possible to add this into Kodi? Big Grin

You mentioned before that if the DTS stream is in a .waw file Kodi can detect this and tries to open the passthrough sink. This made me thinking: with a tag like <forcepassthrough> in the <audio> section of advancedsettings.xml it should not be very complicated to make Kodi always open the PT sink instead of a normal audio output device. Passthrough makes sense only if the HTPC is connected to an AVR and I assume AVRs would have no issue decoding and playing FLAC or MP3 streams they receive as bitstreams via passthrough.

Obviously this might not be useful or even working at all for everybody but I am pretty sure it would make a big number of users happy...

Hi fritsch, may I ask you respectfully to answer my above question? I am not pushing to have this included in Krypton, it's far too late, but it would be great to see this feature, if it is feasible, in Leia.
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DTS music playback from WavPack (.wv) files0