XBMC Audio goes HD
It’s been long-awaited, oft-discussed and it’s finally here – AudioEngine for XBMC!
What is AudioEngine? A complete re-write of the core audio sub-system of XBMC, and a two-year project comprising some 22,000 lines of code.
Spear-headed by lead-developer gnif, with contributions from many other team developers (dddamian, gimli, fneufneu, anssi, memphiz and others!), AudioEngine brings high-definition audio to the already amazing XBMC. No matter the audio source, AE handles the decoding, resampling, transcoding, encoding and streaming of your media, including for the first time DTS-MA, TrueHD and 24-bit audio. XBMC has never sounded better!
With full floating-point audio pipes, even mp3’s sound audibly better, with dithering built-in to further reduce quantization noise.
After a herculean effort and many lost evenings, the team is happy to announce that AudioEngine has been merged with the master branch as of May 15th 2012. As such, it is now possible for the team as a whole to participate in it’s further development and for users to enjoy via the nightlies or your own builds.
Features of AE include:
- support for DTS-MA / Dolby TrueHD Bluray formats (OSX pending)
- support for 24-bit and floating-point audio at up to 384,000hz
- mixing of all streams including GUI sounds even when transcoding audio
- start-up enumeration of hardware audio devices and their capablities with log output
- bitstreaming support in PAPlayer (XBMC’s music player)
- upmixing of stereo to full channel layout
- tighter syncing of A/V streams
- floating-point processing of audio
- 24-bit and floating-point decoding/handling of mp3
- full support for ReplayGain
- built-in sample-rate conversion and transcoding
Planned Features for upcoming AE releases:
- rules-based decisions for output formats based on hardware capabilites
- a range of DSP’s (digital signal processors) including headphone head-related transfer function processing, DRC (dynamic range compression), low-pass filtering for subs and an equalizer function
- custom channel-mixing/mapping for up and downmixing
It’s still early days for AE. Bugs will be found, and new and exciting features added. It’s stability and feature-set will develop as it matures and grows in the amazing open-source environment of XBMC. We’d especially like to thank all the testers who helped make it possible to bring this merge about.
If you want to give it a try just grab one of the nightly versions on one of XBMC’s mirrors. For further details and support links please visit the AudioEngine page in our Wiki where you will also find links to the support threads in our forum, if you have additional questions. From the development team, enjoy!
This doesn’t make sense!
If a 24 bit/48khz PCM soundtrack is compressed (lossless) with Dolby TrueHD, why should it not be possible to decode it to PCM again and then send it to my sound card that is capable of 24bit 96khz @ 7.1?
I already do this in Media Player Classic. I can even decode DTS HD Master there and it is working perfectly (with Arcsoft DTS HD decoder).
/ j
This doesn’t make sense!
If a 24 bit/48khz PCM soundtrack is compressed (lossless) with Dolby TrueHD, why should it not be possible to decode it to PCM again and then send it to my sound card that is capable of 24bit 96khz @ 7.1?
I already do this in Media Player Classic. I can even decode DTS HD Master there and it is working perfectly (with Arcsoft DTS HD decoder).
/ j
Lpcm works great. I didnt edited the new audio settings. Wow this makes blurays sound much more incredible!!!
Horray for the devs and everybody!!!
OK… I’ll be the first to admit this is not where I should discuss this…
BUT… When the first Frodo Alpha came out, it was greeted with some fanfare on the main page, and an anouncement was made that updates would be rolled intpo a monthly.
So, I kept looking for a monthly announcement, and checked in the nighlies… and it did not look like it was out.
Now, it looks like if you are in-the-know and are aware of the repository, you can get it.
(… and I wish to say that I am grateful for that info being shared and the work that was done. No question.)
However, as I like the idea of monthlies, can we go back to a quick notice on the main page of a monthly release, and some of the bullet point updates (with the usual disclaimer / warnings, of course).
Thanks.
(…I’ll take my sopbox with me as I leave.)
Hi,
this might sound a bit silly but, does anyone know how do i test if i got my xbmc set up working properly?
Or indicate me where should i go for advice.
Thanks
@Zebraitis The debug symbols have only been uploaded this evening, so may be an announcement tonight or tommorow maybe. Don’t know.
I have some HD-DVD MKV rips with Dolby Digital +, they don’t play under the official nightly build, but do play under a custom build that another user posted (XBMCSetup-11.0+HD-audio-20120417-2f965ac-dx), can this be added to the nightlies? Also, it seems the Allmusic add-on is reporting that it is currently broken. Other than that, the interface seems cleaner & faster.
Simply de-select TrueHD-capable receiver in the settings – it will be decoded to PCM and streamed as such. AE is capable of resampling it down.
You’ve misread or confusing Dolby True HD with DTS-HD MA: Dolby TrueHD can be decoded and played as LPCM as there are opensource decoder for it. XBMC like most media players uses the FFmpeg libraries to do all the decoding.
It’s DTS-HD MA that doesn’t have decoder and must be bitstreamed.
If you decode a DTS-HD MA what you are really decoding is the DTS-Core stream, so you get 5.1 audio.
Media Player classic doesn’t decode DTS-HD MA.
Maybe you just can’t hear the difference between DTS and DTS-HD MA :)
The original post was incorrect. That your audio/video card can do HDMI 8 channels at 192kHz isn’t sufficient to do HD digital bitstreaming. It must have HBR support. A nvidia 2xx or 3xx will do 8 channels LPCM just fine, but will not do HBR.
You’ve misread or confusing Dolby True HD with DTS-HD MA: Dolby TrueHD can be decoded and played as LPCM as there are opensource decoder for it. XBMC like most media players uses the FFmpeg libraries to do all the decoding.
It’s DTS-HD MA that doesn’t have decoder and must be bitstreamed.
If you decode a DTS-HD MA what you are really decoding is the DTS-Core stream, so you get 5.1 audio.
Media Player classic doesn’t decode DTS-HD MA.
Maybe you just can’t hear the difference between DTS and DTS-HD MA :)
The original post was incorrect. That your audio/video card can do HDMI 8 channels at 192kHz isn’t sufficient to do HD digital bitstreaming. It must have HBR support. A nvidia 2xx or 3xx will do 8 channels LPCM just fine, but will not do HBR.
@Henrik
The new AE hasn’t fixed my 24p audio sync issue. I still have to set my delay to around 200ms. :(
I also get audio cut offs when I choose WASAPI over DirectSound in Win 7. It’s like the audio mutes after 2 seconds of no use.
@Skram0
Ouch :(
Hi!
I haven’t misread or misunderstood anything. You wrote in your initial post “Your audio card could handle 8 channels @ 192kHz yet not do TrueHD and DTS-HD. You need HD passhtrough support, this means you need a nvidia GT4xx or later.” You are saying that a TrueHD stream of 24bit/48khz cannot be played in high res through my high-res capable analogue sound card. Now you say that TrueHD can be decoded to LPCM. Which one is correct?
Do you mean that it will be decoded to LPCM 16bit/48khz? If that is true, then it is sad because my sound card is capable of 24bit 48khz.
I know that DTS HD Master cannot be decoded in XBMC. But MPC HC can do it with the Arcsoft DTS HD Master decoder (proprietary).
And I can surely hear the difference between DTS Core and DTS HD MA in my system. I am interested in getting as high quality audio as possible from XBMC, especially on my TrueHD/LPCM mkvs.
/ j
I’m really impatience to hear it ! Again, nice work everyone !
I gotta say that after doing a git pull to the last version of xbmc with HD Audio, the audio is now total crap. I get the skipping sound all the time and I lost 5.1 sound completely. NOT a good work :-(
Very pleased with this and what great work all you guys have done :)
One question I deleted the old XBMC RC2 build and it asked me if I wanteded to delete all my scans of my folders ? Something like that anyway, so is it best to do a fresh install from scratch ?
Once again thank you so much for such a great piece of software.