(2018-11-19, 00:12)Raboon Wrote: Bad news about this little beast.
[1.] The audio does not sync when watching Amazon's own content. It is about 200ms out, audio ahead of the video.
All other apps are in sync (iPlayer, Kodi etc) so you cannot compensate for the AV offset without knocking the apps out.
Pretty pathetic.
[2.] Further, no matter the app the audio drops out for about a half second around 44 minutes through video playback. A noticeable dropout. This has occurred on Prime Video, iPlayer and Kodi.
With the sync issue I was resigned to using Kodi and the various apps, ignoring Prime content as the Stick is so cheap compared to its competition, but that dropout is a dealbreaker.
I've tried a full reset, running the Stick with various different settings - Dolby Plus off, on stereo only, tried 60Hz, tried 50Hz...) all kinds of flim flam like swapping HDMI ports to fix it... to no avail.
It is up to Amazon to get the software up to par. Considering how obvious the two errors are, I don't understand what is going on over there in Seattle.
Not a good start.
@
Raboon Hi there and welcome to the kodi forum.
May I ask what an AVR brand and Model you own?
- I have very similar Issues with my Onkyo TX-NR616 (old 2012 Model). My async is approx. 180ms (audio ahead of video) when playing 23.976fps content via prime video. All other apps - that unfortunately (!) do not support the new auto refresh rate matching (cinema mode) - are in Sync. When I disable LipSync in my AVRs settings, the async doubles to around 360ms, while netflix etc. then gets an async of 180ms, which indicates that LipSync is clearly adequately correcting the async of 60fps content. So HDMI LipSync seems to work, except that there is apparently a factor 2 missing in the correction offset for 23.976 content.
- Funny thing is: I remember that when @wrxtasy and @Raybuntu began to develop LibreELEC based on Krypton for Odroid C2 over a year ago the same issue became introduced while the prior LibreELEC Odroid C2 builds based on Kodi Jarvis didn't had this audio async issues. I don't know why, but it seemed to have gotten fixed then somehow somewhen. And now I see the very same issue on the brand new Fire TV 4k stick. Besides... On my brothers setup (Marantz SR7008) the stick has also a very noticeable async. But there I hadn't the chance to measure it by trial and error. I guess it should vary from TV to TV, since picture processing of modern TVs takes usually different amounts of time depending on the model and brand.
- I experience these audio drop outs as well. If you hadn't written it, I would have newer noticed it as a reproducible issue. Here it is occurring every 46:31 mms or 46:30. Not sure exactly. Either you have stopped the time inaccurately or the approx 2.5 minutes difference in our audio drop out interval is due to the difference in our audio async (180ms vs 200ms). Perhaps there is a connection between audio async and audio drop out.
- Also this audio drop out does not occur when the Fire TV stick is connected directly to the TV, hence it is an issue that is somehow related to AVR-Use-Case
- And also I could not always find anomalies in Fire TV logcat that I could relate to the dropout when an audio dropout occurred. This is very strange and leads to the fact that this dropout may happen only on the AVRs side so that the Fire TV does not always notice it. Though, such things do not happen on any other device here (FireTV Box 2, Raspberry Pi 2, Odroid C2), that is why I do not believe that it is a bug of my onkyo receiver.
Sometimes (but not always at least on PrimeVideo always) I can find such entries in logcat when dropout occurs:
1:
11-30 20:14:36.896 275 21346 D AudioALSAPlaybackHandlerTunnelHDMI: +drain() W 16384, R 18324, Underrun 1, type 0
11-30 20:14:36.897 275 21346 D AudioALSAPlaybackHandlerTunnelHDMI: -drain()re 0, W 0, R 0, Underrun 1
11-30 20:14:36.900 275 21346 D AudioTunnelStreamOut: alsaUnderFlowCheck() Underrun hanppen 1, reset mAFSinkedFrames = 0
11-30 20:14:36.901 275 21346 D AudioALSAPlaybackHandlerTunnelHDMI: resetUnderflowStatus() set kUnderrun flag = 0
11-30 20:14:36.901 275 21346 D AudioTunnelStreamOut: -resetUnderflowState() reset kUnderrunFlag,ret 0
Perhaps some of you guys also noticed the bug that the Fire TV Stick 4k is deactivating the "auto frame rate matching" after reboot, because it sets resolution from automatic to 1080p60. This also only happens if the FireTV is connected to an AVR instead of directly to TV.
So clearly the Fire TV Stick 4K has still a lot of HDMI issues that need to be addressed by amazon. Hopefully they are open for bug fixing. Though I am quite shocked that they didn't notice the audio async during quality assurance. Cannot imagine that they do not test their top selling media player for compatibility with A/V receivers prior to throwing it on the market.
Also worth mentioning regarding Fire TV Stick 4K: It is always playing back Dolby Didital or Dolby Digital Plus (depending on your equipment), even while browsing through the Fire TV GUI/interface. That means that the Fire TV Stick apparently does some kind of dolby digital plus live encoding, as even 2.0 sources (which output as PCM 2.0 on my Fire TV 2 Box) are outputted in dolby digital plus 2.0 to my Receiver. If connected to my TV, everything is outputtet as 2.0 Dolby Digital if the source is stereo PCM 2.0. Actually that's the first time I see a device doing dolby digital plus live encoding. That may also explain how the new audio dialogue gain feature works: It may be implemented as a metadata of dolby digital (plus) DRC / Center gain. Though even if I have dialogue gain/boost (or whatever it is called in english Fire TV menu) disabled, apps like zattoo IPTV display a +4db dolby metadata gain on my receiver during audio stream initialization. Don't know how Fire TV can decide that a PCM 2.0 source should of all things be boosted by 4db during encoding into Dolby Digital Plus 2.0 (stereo).
Edit
Audio dropout happens reproducibly every 46:36.219 mm: ss.ms respectively every 2796219 ms when connected to an AVR - no matter which refresh rate and tested on PrimeVideo, Zattoo IPTV, Youtube, netflix not yet tested.