Welcome to Doom9's Forum, THE in-place to be for everyone interested in DVD conversion.

Before you start posting please read the forum rules. By posting to this forum you agree to abide by the rules.

 

Go Back   Doom9's Forum > Hardware & Software > Software players

Reply
 
Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
Old 14th April 2009, 21:16   #61  |  Link
buletti
Registered User
 
Join Date: Jun 2007
Posts: 42
Hi Shadson,
just dropping by to say thanks for your efforts.
Furthermore I want to endorse what leeperry mentioned about the windows kernel mixer. High bitrate audio on the PC is actually not existing and this is very sad. So although there is a huge quantity of SACDs on the market there are no SACD drives for PCs. The only alternative is DVD Audio but on PC it is unnecessarily crippled and mutilated because there is no suitable software. Of the few players capable of playing DVD Audio none is actually useful and worth to be mentioned. The creative player which could do the trick is only working with creative hardware and the big software players (PowerDVD and WinDVD) are actually not allowed to provide high quality audio. They have to resample everything to 16 bit @ 48kHz to please the media industry.
So, I was more than happy to see ShaPlayer coming up. At the time being though I have to say that it is not yet the killer application it could be. The reason for this is not its look or a missing seeking bar. The actual reason is that it feeds the windows kernel mixer, which is also down sampling to 16/48. So, there is yet not much of a benefit to use it except for playing watermarked discs (which is nice tho!).
However, if you found a way to provide bit perfect PCM passthrough, for example via kernel streaming (like foobar, winamp, reclock) or via ASIO, then ShaPlayer would become THE player. The audiophile guys over at the AVSforum would kill for it.. even if it only has 3 ugly buttons.

Last edited by buletti; 14th April 2009 at 21:22.
buletti is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 14th April 2009, 21:19   #62  |  Link
leeperry
Kid for Today
 
Join Date: Aug 2004
Posts: 3,477
well you can route to Reclock, and then enable WASAPI/KS...it's not too functional and will make glitches at the beginning of each track(due to its prebuffer), but you know....it's either this or KMixer

I guess most "audiophiles" have ways to bypass KMixer anyway(bitperfect MME/Audiotrak "DirectWire")
leeperry is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 15th April 2009, 02:48   #63  |  Link
Midzuki
Unavailable
 
Midzuki's Avatar
 
Join Date: Mar 2009
Location: offline
Posts: 1,480
To whom this may concern:

I indeed respect very much the "golden ear" point-of-view; OTOH, the non-audiophiles, too, have the right to listen to DVD-A stuff on their PCs without the artificial need for bloatwares and/or "Creative frAUDwares" — and to "nosotros", an audio player which is less functional (please pay attention: I've said *functional*, I have *not* said "full of bells and whistles") than the simplest hardware CD-player available,
quickly becomes an outstanding piece of annoyance. And even worse than this, ShaPLAY.exe "didn't know" that one really doesn't need a CPU faster than 3GHz for playing AOB files without crashing the player itself after a "Jump To The Next Track" command. But now, Mr. Shadson has taken the time to dramatically improve his software — and I sincerely thank him for that.

Notwithstanding, if he himself and/or other "Doom9ers" have ever misconcluded that I was looking for a fancy-looking .AOB player, well, this is not my fault.

\ Midzuki

Last edited by Midzuki; 15th April 2009 at 05:39.
Midzuki is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 15th April 2009, 19:27   #64  |  Link
buletti
Registered User
 
Join Date: Jun 2007
Posts: 42
@frenchglen: I just tested ShaPLAY with ReClock and it works (didn't know one can use ReClock as audio renderer without feeding a video stream). Just make sure that you check "Force ReClock to be loaded in place of default DirectSound/Wave renderers" and select "Kernel Streaming" for "Audio interface to use for PCM sound". I also found it valuable to reduce the 500ms sound buffer of ReClock to avoid clipped track beginnings.
buletti is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 15th April 2009, 19:37   #65  |  Link
Shadson
Registered User
 
Join Date: Mar 2009
Posts: 34
Quote:
Originally Posted by buletti View Post
Just make sure that you check "Force ReClock to be loaded in place of default DirectSound/Wave renderers"
You can skip this step by manually entering GUID of ReClock into cfg-file - if you want to use it only in ShaPLAY. ReClock will not be called when you will try to watch movie or something else. Also it will be good to select in this case "BuildFullGraph" and choose 'None' as filter in ShaPLAY.

UPDATED: It seems that ReClocks moved to SlySoft.

Last edited by Shadson; 15th April 2009 at 19:48.
Shadson is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 15th April 2009, 22:27   #66  |  Link
frenchglen
Registered User
 
Join Date: Apr 2007
Posts: 60
That is wonderful news, thank so much for the info. With the current (only working) method I'm using, WaveParser, I can indeed hear a click at beginning of tracks when I ckip to it or start it. Maybe that's the "clipped track begginings" you mention...

I'll try the whole reclock thing when I get the time...

Bravo shadson, keep it going I look forward to seeing what things you *decide* to put in for the next update. 0.4 was a wonderful update!
frenchglen is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 16th April 2009, 09:56   #67  |  Link
Shadson
Registered User
 
Join Date: Mar 2009
Posts: 34
Quote:
Originally Posted by frenchglen View Post
With the current (only working) method I'm using, WaveParser
Try "None", this will not allow WaveParser to enter graph, and your old question "Does WaveParser downsample ot not?" will not be actual Only ShaPLAY's source filter and DirectShow renderer will be used.

Last edited by Shadson; 16th April 2009 at 11:09.
Shadson is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 17th April 2009, 11:40   #68  |  Link
Loul
Registered User
 
Join Date: Dec 2002
Location: Paris, France
Posts: 37
With some effort I think I might succeed in configuring it all so there s no downsampling to suffer after the decoding has been made by shaplay.... but I'm sure many of the people I know won't be able to do so or wouldn't want to as it will seem it all too complicated...

I don't know if this is realistic but an option to do it all through shaplay without toying with filters (most people don't even know what a filter is nor what directshow is) would be just fantastic.

I wonder if this is doable.
Loul is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 17th April 2009, 12:51   #69  |  Link
gurubhai
Registered User
 
Join Date: Apr 2008
Posts: 18
I would really love asio support. It is much better than the wasapi support provided by reclock ( in vista/seven).

and asio4all works on almost any soundcard so one really doesn't need to buy an asio supporting soundcard
gurubhai is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 21st April 2009, 02:07   #70  |  Link
puck
Registered User
 
Join Date: Apr 2009
Posts: 13
Thanks for this valuable program, Shadson. Much appreciated. You've done a wonderful thing for people with DVD-Audio collections. And spent more time on it than you wanted to, it seems. However, I hope you and/or others keep refining it for function (not skins and bloat). After trying it out, my observations are:

1. The most important feature for me is high resolution playback (e.g., 24/88 and higher) with no resampling. So I set up ShaPlay with ReClock Kernel Streaming as described in above posts. Playing it back via my E-mu card, I proved to myself that Kmixer was bypassed. But it looks to me like ReClock resamples the audio stream anyway. When playing back 24/192 from an actual DVDA disc, my CPU load jumped from about 8% to above 50% when I changed the resampling setting from "good" to "excellent" in ReClock. I wasn't trying to get better resampling. I was just trying to determine if ReClock was resampling or not. I was hoping that with no video stream, ReClock wouldn't bother to resample the audio. But it seemed to resample, and I don't see any way to disable audio resampling in ReClock, probably because audio resampling seems to be its primary purpose. But it would be nice if ReClock could be used just to bypass Kmixer without ReClock doing resampling anyway. Or am I missing something? What have other people experienced? I was using ReClock version 1.8.4.2 and ShaPlay 0.4a.

2. My 2nd priority is gapless playback between tracks (e.g., for concerts). But I'm guessing it's not really possible in ShaPlay because the code probably uses DVD Explorer's algorithms to decode the audio one track at a time. Is that right? Or could it be done with fancy buffers to somehow splice the tracks together gaplessly--if one had the brains and the time? If gapless play is not really implementable, though, I'm not so surprised. The Audigy DVDA software player won't play concerts gaplessly. Neither will DVDA Solo, the last time I tried its demo. And PowerDVD and WinDVD still have downsample issues, I believe.

3. This is really severe nit-picking, but you might want to fix spelling on the player: "preffered" should be "preferred." I misspell all the time, but I wouldn't want it appearing on a product I had made.

My system is WinXP sp2, P4 3.0 GHz, 2 GB RAM. I use E-mu 1212m for stereo playback; I have to use Audigy 2ZS for multi-channel.
puck is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 21st April 2009, 06:30   #71  |  Link
Shadson
Registered User
 
Join Date: Mar 2009
Posts: 34
1. I'm not a ReClock specialist, and my hardware will not support bit-perfect streaming, so I can't check it all very deep. But look also at this thread.
EDIT: Try also set speed in ReClock to 'Original speed'.

2. Well, it was more easy than it seems. I plan to make it in next version, but it will be not so fast.
3. Already done on my system, but you will see it only in next release.
I have a lot to do in real life, so you have to wait new version some time.

Last edited by Shadson; 21st April 2009 at 10:07.
Shadson is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 21st April 2009, 10:58   #72  |  Link
Shadson
Registered User
 
Join Date: Mar 2009
Posts: 34
IMPORTANT THING:
It will not be possible to play 176kHz or 192kHz tracks in WinXP - default 'DirectSound Renderer' doesn't support such frequencies. But ReClock does support. Use ReClock as replacement for default renderer.
I am not sure about Vista or Win7. Can anybody check 192kHz tracks w/o ReClock in Vista/Win7?
Shadson is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 21st April 2009, 15:03   #73  |  Link
gurubhai
Registered User
 
Join Date: Apr 2008
Posts: 18
@puck use the option : slave reference clock to audio to avoid resampling in reclock.

@shadson : as I mentioned before reclock bypasses kmixer using wasapi which does not support 24 bit.

Please look into asio support.
gurubhai is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 21st April 2009, 16:41   #74  |  Link
Shadson
Registered User
 
Join Date: Mar 2009
Posts: 34
Quote:
Originally Posted by gurubhai View Post
@shadson : as I mentioned before reclock bypasses kmixer using wasapi which does not support 24 bit.
But sometimes it supports 24 bit padded to 32bit.
Try this.
Shadson is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 21st April 2009, 17:46   #75  |  Link
gurubhai
Registered User
 
Join Date: Apr 2008
Posts: 18
ya, sometimes
gurubhai is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 21st April 2009, 22:44   #76  |  Link
puck
Registered User
 
Join Date: Apr 2009
Posts: 13
Thanks guys for your good and quick replies.

@Shadson: Really cool that you have an update planned someday for gapless. And I'm not impatient; I'm sure you will get to it when you're able, on your own schedule. Also, thanks for the links--will check them out. (by the way, I was already using ReClock with ShaPlay for the high resolutions above 96 kHz.)

@gurubhai: Yes, I noticed that enabling the slave reference clock option during playback seemed to turn off the resampling, but it disables itself as soon as the next track plays, so not an elegant answer--unless I did it wrong and/or the ReClock coders could make it a more global option so it stays on. I managed to find what seems a better answer, anyway--at least for me (just interested in ReClock for audio-only playback). You can get a replacement for ReClock's resampler.dll, which is just a pass-through of the audio data (input=output), so basically it is a no-resampling version of the resampler.dll. Just copy it to the ReClock program folder, and then ReClock seems to quit resampling, and its CPU load drops to nil. Get it here: http://forum.slysoft.com/showthread.php?t=27610

But you give me bad news that 24-bit is not supported by this method. Tell me, if the source MLP is 24-bit integer, what happens to it going through WASAPI? Just gets truncated to 16-bit, or what? And how can a person tell? Or maybe you just have to know that WASAPI doesn't support 24-bit? I notice in ReClock 1.8.4.2 Configuration you can set output to 24 bit PCM--is this just bogus for the "Kernel Stream" interface option, then?
puck is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 22nd April 2009, 06:30   #77  |  Link
puck
Registered User
 
Join Date: Apr 2009
Posts: 13
@ gurubhai: You mentioned lack of 24 bit support. Is 24 bit just a Vista problem (not a WinXP problem)?

I got sound in my E-mu card with a 24 bit source MLP played in ShaPlay with ReClock's KS output and the no-resample .dll mentioned in my prior post. So I just assumed it received 24 bit input unmolested, but I don't know how to verify the bit rate the card is receiving.
puck is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 22nd April 2009, 08:05   #78  |  Link
Shadson
Registered User
 
Join Date: Mar 2009
Posts: 34
You can have problem with 24bit if you use:
Vista _AND_ ReClock in WASAPI mode _AND_ sound card drivers that does not support 24 bit in WASAPI mode.
The output in this case will not be downsampled/resampled, it will not work at all or you will have silence. You can try to bypass this problem by using 32bit output in ReClock (see link I gave before).
Shadson is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 22nd April 2009, 11:07   #79  |  Link
gurubhai
Registered User
 
Join Date: Apr 2008
Posts: 18
@Puck : I think the issue is with wasapi only, so KS output should be fine.Even foobar wasapi plugin had similar issue and It was them who found the workaround of padding 24bit to 32 bit.

This padding seems to work on some soundcards but not on all. I personally feel that a player which deals exclusively with 24bit audio should have a better implementation like asio rather than a wasapi workaround.

This is what happens when I try to play 24bit audio using reclock, so if you are not getting this error then you are probably fine.


Free Image Hosting by ImageBam.com

Last edited by gurubhai; 22nd April 2009 at 11:28.
gurubhai is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 22nd April 2009, 17:04   #80  |  Link
puck
Registered User
 
Join Date: Apr 2009
Posts: 13
Thanks for fast answers again, guys.
I don't get any error message like yours and I get sound, so I guess my MLP is getting to the card unmolested. Maybe our discussion helps others, too.

I agree about ASIO. Both my cards have it. Too bad ShaPlay can't use it.
puck is offline   Reply With Quote
Reply

Tags
dvd-audio

Thread Tools Search this Thread
Search this Thread:

Advanced Search
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off

Forum Jump


All times are GMT +1. The time now is 12:10.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.8.11
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, vBulletin Solutions Inc.