LAV Filters - DirectShow Media Splitter and Decoders

[glorp]

I realize you two know infinitely more than I do about it but I'm pretty sure I've been able to swap wtv splitters in WMC for recorded tv by using "Codec Tweak Tool" on several x64 systems. The Preferred splitters selections of that allow you to toggle back and forth between LAV and system merit. I know I've used it to switch between LAV splitter and the MS StreamBufferSource thingy multiple times.

Edit: NVM. You found Codec Tweak.

[dansrfe]

Is there a way to upmix 2.0 to 5.1 in LAV Audio? Thanks!

[6233638]

Is there a way to upmix 2.0 to 5.1 in LAV Audio? Thanks!I think you just need to set mixing to 5.1 and uncheck the "don't mix stereo sources" option.

[AngelGraves13]

Feature requests

* Bit-Matched - Inpput/Output bits do not change. 16-bit integer plays as 16-bit integer without conversion to 32-bit floating point or 24-bit integer. A way to disable any and all bit-changing in LAV Audio. I even listen to music with my X-Fi set to Audio Creation mode and "bit-matched" because it sounds the best.
Example: Lawrence of Arabia is 16-bit integer DTS-HD MA 5.1. I'm using the ArcSoft DTS Decoder and it decoding dts-hdma, but the output is 32-bit floating point. I'd like 16-bit integer to play as 16-bit integer and 24-bit integer to play as 24-bit integer. The best I can get by disabling all the checkboxes including Dithering under Output formats is that it still wants to do 32-bit floating point. If I only enable 16-bit integer, even 24-bit integer plays at 16-bit. If I enable 24-bit integer as well, then 16-bit integer plays at 24-bit integer. Why? Why can't it respect the bits and not change the output bits?
* DTS-HD Bit-rate - Use the Pin Info Output bit-rate for the stream bit-rate under the LAV Splitter so it shows the correct bit-rate in MPC-HC/BE.
Example: Input says 1536kbps regardless of the MA stream. The output under Pin Info for Baraka is "6144kbps" so maybe it should just use that as it's more accurate rather than using the core stream, even if the core is actually only 1506kbps sometimes.

[Qaq]

Example: Lawrence of Arabia is 16-bit integer DTS-HD MA 5.1. I'm using the ArcSoft DTS Decoder and it decoding dts-hdma, but the output is 32-bit floating point.
ArcSoft DTS Decoder is not used. Arcsoft outputs in integer (always) and ffmpeg outputs in 32float (always).

[AngelGraves13]

ArcSoft DTS Decoder is not used. Arcsoft outputs in integer (always) and ffmpeg outputs in 32float (always).

It is used. I've dropped the dtsdecoder file in the x86 directory and it says "dts-hd ma" I'm also using the x86 version of MPC BE.

This is the decoder file from TMT6.

[nevcairiel]

It already does bit-exact output, works just perfectly. If DTS outputs 32-bit float, then either the ArcSoft decoder is not working, OR you have mixing activated. Mixing always outputs 32-bit float because after mixing the audio changed anyway, and mixing is performed in float. There is no bit-exact anymore.

For the Pin Info, DTS-HD MA does not have a constant bitrate, so there is no one bitrate value thats accurate. The 6144kbps is the PCM bitrate, and not the DTS bitrate. This will most likely not change.

[e-t172]

* Bit-Matched - Inpput/Output bits do not change. 16-bit integer plays as 16-bit integer without conversion to 32-bit floating point or 24-bit integer. A way to disable any and all bit-changing in LAV Audio. I even listen to music with my X-Fi set to Audio Creation mode and "bit-matched" because it sounds the best.

Unless your system is broken (e.g. DirectSound on XP), or you're in the extreme case of listening through in-ear headphones at very high levels, I very much doubt you'll be able to hear the +3dB noise floor increase caused by an integer conversion. It is highly likely your brain is making you hear differences that aren't there. That happens extremely often when dealing with audio quality matters.

[AngelGraves13]

Unless your system is broken (e.g. DirectSound on XP), or you're in the extreme case of listening through in-ear headphones at very high levels, I very much doubt you'll be able to hear the +3dB noise floor increase caused by an integer conversion. It is highly likely your brain is making you hear differences that aren't there. That happens extremely often when dealing with audio quality matters.

I had the Mixer on, which is why it was 32-bit floating point. Turning off the Mixer makes it bit-matched.

[e-t172]

Which doesn't change the fact that enforcing "bit matching" at all costs brings no audible benefit in almost all circumstances.

[filler56789]

Unless your system is broken (e.g. DirectSound on XP),

Please tell us what is "broken" in XP's DirectSound implementation.
By "broken", I mean something so wrong that there is no fix nor workaround for it.

[nevcairiel]

Its broken in the sense that it relies on the audio driver to handle mixing and conversion, and *many* drivers are just broken in that regard. Even so-called "pro" audio devices sometimes don't have drivers that can handle 32-bit float.

[filler56789]

^ Thanks for the explanation. :goodpost:

[dansrfe]

I guess 2.0 doesn't upmix to 5.1 even with the "Don't mix stereo sources" checkbox unchecked. I'm not hearing anything coming out of the other channel speakers.

[paradoxical]

I guess 2.0 doesn't upmix to 5.1 even with the "Don't mix stereo sources" checkbox unchecked. I'm not hearing anything coming out of the other channel speakers.

Did you hear anything come out of the center channel? If so, it's upmixing, but upmixing is not magic. I listen to stereo source all the time upmixed to 5.1 with Dolby Prologic and the biggest benefit is the dialogue going to the center and quite often the rear surrounds get next to nothing.

[dansrfe]

Did you hear anything come out of the center channel? If so, it's upmixing, but upmixing is not magic. I listen to stereo source all the time upmixed to 5.1 with Dolby Prologic and the biggest benefit is the dialogue going to the center and quite often the rear surrounds get next to nothing.

I'm not hearing anything out of the center speaker. Just to make sure the values for Center, Surround and LFE that you have are 0.71, 0.71, and 1.58 right? Even at 1.0, 1.0, 1.58 I don't hear anything from the other channels...

[paradoxical]

I'm not hearing anything out of the center speaker. Just to make sure the values for Center, Surround and LFE that you have are 0.71, 0.71, and 1.58 right? Even at 1.0, 1.0, 1.58 I don't hear anything from the other channels...

Yeah, I have all at defaults.

[LoopinFool]

dansrfe,

I don't think it's just you.

In the LAV Audio properties, I set my speaker config to 5.1, enabled mixing, then played a stereo source.

The status tab shows all 6 channels on output, but the meters only show audio coming out of FL and FR.

The Mix Level sliders are labeled as applying to a downmix, not to this case. The Pro Logic options are labeled as "Matrix Encoding" which I believe also would only apply to a downmix.

I also just realized there's no Pro Logic decode option for this stereo expansion case. If ffmpeg supports it, that might be a nice option, and may be the only reasonable way to do this at all.

- LoopinFool

[DragonQ]

Surely that is by design? If you're listening to stereo on a 5.1 setup you should only get sound from the front left & right speakers. I assumed the benefit of upmixing to 5.1 (but keeping 4 channels empty) is so your PC's output can be 5.1 (or 7.1, etc.) all the time, without your A/V receiver or amp having to switch modes. But I dunno, I don't have any of these things, just a humble HDTV with stereo speakers. :p

[nevcairiel]

Its not meant to upmix, because simple matrix upmixing just sounds terrible IMHO, and more complicated approaches go beyond what i'm willing to do at this point.

[Brotoles]

I also posted this message on the madVR thread, but from madshi's response, it seems I should have posted this doubt here:

"I use K-lite Codec Pack for my multimedia needs. I have the latest version installed (9.7.5), and it comes with MPC-HC v1.6.6.6517, LAV Filters v0.55.2-16-gd6e6c1f and madVR v0.85.8

I use the LAV decoder filter for almost all of my video streams, and madVR as the video renderer. I have an nVidia GTX 670 with the latest WHQL drivers (v314.07), and Win7 x64.

When I playbak a DVD using this decoder-renderer combination, no subtitles or subtitle overlays (menu highlights, etc) are displayed. But when I use MPC-HC internal MPEG2 decoder and keep using madVR as the renderer, the subtitles and overlays are displayed just fine.

Now here's my doubt - is this a LAV issue, such as: it doesn't feed the subtitle stream correctly to the madVR renderer; or is it a madVR issue, such as: madVR isn't compatible yet with the way LAV handles subtitle streams?

Thank you all for your attention, and have a great day,

Brotoles"

This was the original message. Now here is madshi's reply:

"madVR is not responsible (or even able) to draw the subtitles at the moment. So the issue can't be with madVR, I think. Try asking nevcairiel about this in the LAV thread. He might need a sample of your DVD (menu)."

I thought that madVR was drawing the subtitles, but by madshi's reply, it seems that the subtitles are being rendered by MPC-HC internal subtitle renderer instead. So I tried using LAV decoder with the EVR Custom Renderer, and the subtitles also didn't show up, so it really seem like a LAV filter issue. I also updated the LAV filters to version 0.55.3 today, and the subtitles still don't work when using LAV as the MPEG2 decoder...

Thanks a lot for your great work, have a nice day!

[nevcairiel]

DVD menus and subtitles work just fine for me and many others here.
LAV itself draws the menus and subtitles for DVDs because its a rather special case.

[Brotoles]

Hi nevcairiel, I'm posting this message to say that LAV isn't the problem at all...

I checked the filters used when playing back a DVD, and it was Microsft's DTV-DVD video decoder, not LAV... It's that I install K-Lite's codec pack, and even though I configure the intial setup to use the LAV Video for decoding MPEG2, it wasn't using it for DVD.

So I went to LAV setup, and under the "Formats" tab, the "Enable DVD Video support" option was unchecked. I then checked it, and tried playing the DVD again: now MPC was telling me that the LAV Video decoder was being used, and the subtitles played perfectly!

Sorry to bother you without checking everything thourougly. But anyways, why is this "Enable DVD Video support" unchecked by default? Is this a K-Lite configuration thing, or is it LAV default behavior?

Once again, thanks a lot not only for your great work, but for your patience too :-)

[nevcairiel]

Its a K-Lite thing, LAV has it enabled by default.

[sofakng]

I'm new to DirectShow filters (I've been using XBMC for Linux) and I'm deciding on an MKV splitter (Haali vs LAV) and from what I've read LAV doesn't support MKV linking. Is this true? (i.e. an MKV file can link to other MKV files so playing the end of one file will automatically play the next one, etc)

I've also read about Haali supporting ordered chapters and multiple streams for the same video (i.e. Director's Cut, etc). Does anybody have more information on that?

[DragonQ]

LAV Splitter doesn't support ordered chapters yet. Not sure about the other thing. Aside from that the only time I have to use Haali Splitter is for TS-Doctor, where LAV Splitter doesn't do frame-accurate seeking properly and cuts often end up in the wrong places (Haali actually has issues with sometimes too but they are relatively rare).

[Niyawa]

I have question... like always.

A little fellow posted this in the KCP thread claiming that ffdshow tryouts have better performance than LAV when using 8 threads or more (http://i.imgur.com/DD4kUCu.png). I can't argue with numbers but I'm not sure if Null Renderer would be the right thing to use in this occasion... would it? Also, if anyone knows where comes the application in the screenie I provided I would appreciate a name.

[nevcairiel]

I bet thats 10-bit content, with LAV either doing proper dithering to 8-bit or handling 10-bit unchanged, and ffdshow doing 8-bit rounded output? Obviously thats going to be slightly faster. :p
LAV focuses on quality first, speed only second.

LAVs internal processing model also has a slight overhead, however it will pay off if you use a lot of processing in the graph (software deinterlacing, ffdshow raw with post-processing), because LAV can continue decoding in another thread while the main thread is doing the processing.
In future ffmpeg/libav updates, this overhead will also go down because it will be a lot easier to shuffle around frame references.

PS:
That tool is GraphStudio(Next)

[Niyawa]

I bet thats 10-bit content, with LAV either doing proper dithering to 8-bit or handling 10-bit unchanged, and ffdshow doing 8-bit rounded output? Obviously thats going to be slightly faster. :p
LAV focuses on quality first, speed only second.

PS:
That tool is GraphStudio(Next)
Quality always comes with a price, hahaha. Thanks for the app info. The difference is like of 2% so I'm not sure that makes so much of difference on actual playback anyway.

[nevcairiel]

You only really notice the difference when over-taxing your CPU anyway, if you run it on a thread count appropriate for your CPU, it won't matter.
Such high-thread counts are really only useful for benchmarking, during playback they do nothing but eat up more memory.

[Niyawa]

You only really notice the difference when over-taxing your CPU anyway, if you run it on a thread count appropriate for your CPU, it won't matter.
Such high-thread counts are really only useful for benchmarking, during playback they do nothing but eat up more memory.
I'll keep that in mind.

[Mercury_22]

Both DXVA are broken after latest (ffmpeg ?) updates

[wanezhiling]

My nightly builds are now available here: http://roy.orz.hm/lavf-w32-nightlies/

http://roy.orz.hm/lavf-w32-nightlies/lavf-my130228-045c141.7z
Cant register .ax:)

[blexley]

Which is better with Lav Filters Windows 8 Media Player or Media Player classic as some people are saying that the Win8 player is phoning home to Microsoft with logging?

[nevcairiel]

Both DXVA are broken after latest (ffmpeg ?) updates

Fixed again, the ffmpeg build script needed a small update after some configure changes in ffmpeg.

[Mercury_22]

Fixed again, the ffmpeg build script needed a small update after some configure changes in ffmpeg. :thanks: Working now :)

[mark0077]

guys, is there a trick to getting stereo to upmix to 5.1 with lav. I have mixing enabled, all other mixing settings set to default, Dolby Pro Logic II selected.

I can't hear any difference and the "Status" tab always only shows L and R output no matter what combination of options I select. I'm using LAV 0.55.3 along with Reclock as wasapi output device. Lav says its getting 2 channels in, 6 channels out. Reclock says its getting 6 channels in. I just can't hear anything from them.

[SeeMoreDigital]

Lav says its getting 2 channels in, 6 channels out. Reclock says its getting 6 channels in. I just can't hear anything from them.
How are you outputting the audio from your computer. Is it via 6Ch analogue, SPDIF or HDMI?

[DragonQ]

Nev went through this a few posts back. Outputting in 5.1/7.1 does not do "upmixing" of the original stereo signal. The rear and side channels will be blank.

[mark0077]

Ah ok sorry, I misunderstood its use, thanks.

[ntropy]

Would it be possible to allow playback of renamed .mpls file? In my situation I would like to duplicate .mpls files that point to tv episodes and rename them to include season and episode numbers in the name so that that are scan-able by XBMC. XBMC is currently able to play these renamed .mpls files internally, but when I set my externalplayer to MPC-HC with LAV, I encounter the "Cannot render the file" error.

Thanks!

[filler56789]

http://roy.orz.hm/lavf-w32-nightlies/lavf-my130228-045c141.7z
Cant register .ax:)

Same problem in lavf-my130301-ad71550.7z :scared: :mad:

[blexley]

Windows 8 pro N revision does not have MediaPlayer installed.

If i use MPC and Lav Filters with the version will i have any problems not having Windows codecs , are they needed at all?

Thanks

[DragonQ]

Windows codecs are not needed.

[06_taro]

Same problem in lavf-my130301-ad71550.7z :scared: :mad:

Does not seem to be any errors in sources, as I cannot reproduce it with my own build:
LAVFilters-0.55.3-14-git-r2655(ad71550).7z (http://www.nmm-hd.org/upload/get~8PzYdYrOvBE/LAVFilters-0.55.3-14-git-r2655(ad71550).7z)
LAVFilters-0.55.3-14-git-r2655(ad71550)-Installer.7z (http://www.nmm-hd.org/upload/get~HojrUa9iJnk/LAVFilters-0.55.3-14-git-r2655(ad71550)-Installer.7z)

Built by MSVC2012, tested on Win 8 Pro.

[blexley]

Windows codecs are not needed.

Thanks DragonQ

How will this effect the part of Lav filters option that chooses " Use Microsoft WMV9 DMO decoder WMV3 and VC-1 " ?

That is why i assumed it might be needed.

[filler56789]

Does not seem to be any errors in sources, as I cannot reproduce it with my own build:
LAVFilters-0.55.3-14-git-r2655(ad71550).7z (http://www.nmm-hd.org/upload/get~8PzYdYrOvBE/LAVFilters-0.55.3-14-git-r2655(ad71550).7z)
LAVFilters-0.55.3-14-git-r2655(ad71550)-Installer.7z (http://www.nmm-hd.org/upload/get~HojrUa9iJnk/LAVFilters-0.55.3-14-git-r2655(ad71550)-Installer.7z)

Built by MSVC2012, tested on Win 8 Pro.

:thanks:

Your build works as it should :) :) :)

[somebug]

I have some questions,

I find using Haali video renderer for blu-ray and mkv files best, but I also have the LAV filters installed. When I check my active filters while using Haali, I see LAV Video Decoder active as well. Is this normal/is it in anyway doing anything to the video, such as dithering and if so, how do I stop it?

Also are there are any issues with the x64 versions of the LAV Filters or will installing them alongside the x86 version be fine?

[paradoxical]

What would be abnormal about that? Also, LAV Decoder only does dithering if you force it to output, for example, 8-bit if you're feeding it a 10-bit source (obviously also hardware decoders can't decode anything but 8-bit). Otherwise it will output the source as is and let the renderer do the dithering. If you don't want it to do certain things disable those options.

[Aspeh]

Windows 8 pro N revision does not have MediaPlayer installed.

If i use MPC and Lav Filters with the version will i have any problems not having Windows codecs , are they needed at all?

Thanks

Thanks DragonQ

How will this effect the part of Lav filters option that chooses " Use Microsoft WMV9 DMO decoder WMV3 and VC-1 " ?

That is why i assumed it might be needed.

Good Question

Can any experts answer this as i'm looking to upgrade my XP machines to Win 8 and was thinking of getting the N version as well as it doesn't have any Media player installed.Or would i be better getting the standard Windows 8 pro version for the WMV9 DMO decoder WMV3 and VC-1 option ???