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DVD Rips won't play in Surround Sound

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RockyMalerbo:
WER asked:

What audio menu?

I was referring to the audio menu on the DVD. You know, Main Menu, Audio, Bonus Features, Subtitles, etc.

wer:
So that's the interactive DVD menu. What it's called (Audio), and what it looks like, is up to the disc designer. It might be called Audio on one disc, Sound on another, or be missing completely or under a Setup menu on a third. Also, the order is up to the designer, and what track appears at the top, or left, is meaningless. One track is designated the default track, but where that track is listed is arbitrary. On some discs the default track might be listed first, on others it might be listed last.

The Streams and Language menus that appear on the MC right-click menu are built based on MC's analysis of the disc (or IFO) and do not have any relation to the Interactive DVD Menu.

RockyMalerbo:
Wer Wrote:

Rocky, for you I suggest you try selecting alternate audio tracks using the LANGUAGE menu shown in the right-click menu in the screenshot you provided. That works.


That DOES work, Wer. I tried it with a rip of Jethro Tull's Benefit audio DVD from the deluxe box set. When I clicked-on LANGUAGE, it listed English three times. The top one is Stereo, the middle one is DTS 5.1, and the bottom one is Dolby Digital 5.1. Hooray! Thank you very much, Wer!!! (JRiver could label that a little better, though.)

I am an old-fashoned record collector and audiophile. JRiver has given me the opportunity to have something of which I could only dream - an audio/video jukebox with all of my CDs, Hi-res files, DVDs, Blu-rays, bootlegs, and TV recordings in one place at the touch of my fingers. They are stored on 4 external hard dives and played with JRiver through my Dell Laptop and my Home Theater system. I only handle a physical disc once -  to rip it.

Thanks to all of you for your suggestions and help.

EnglishTiger:
Today I decided to do a bit more exploring and discovered that Audio Path isn't the only thing displaying Misleading Information, plus I found a few other oddities.
1st I loaded the Beatles Abbey Road DVD(BluRay) fired up MakeMKV and told it to open the disc to see what it was telling me about the content. Unlike the bumph that comes with the Album(s) which only mentions 3 Audio Streams - Dolby Atmos, 96khz/24bit DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1, 96khz/24 bit High Res Stereo; MakeMKV told me there were 5 Audio Streams - LPCM Stereo, DTS-HD MA Surround 5.1, DTS Surround 5.1 (nested under the DTA-HD entry in the tree), TrueHD Surround 7.1, DD Surround 5.1 (nested under the TrueHD entry in the tree). [1st attached image]

Then I fired up MC27 and told it to play the DVD and switched to the DolbyAtmos Stream and used the right click menu to see what Audio Streams MC was seeing - it had 4 - the DTS Surround 5.1 stream was not present and the DD Surround 5.1 was listed as ac3 and had the word [sub[ behind it [2nd Attached Image]
I then switched to the Blu-Ray Menu changed the stream to the PCM Stereo Stream then used the right click menu to bring up the stream list - this was identical to the one revealed when I was using what I now know to be "Title Playback" [3rd Attached Image].

Now for the differences - when in "Title Playback Mode" I had to use the Right Click Menu to change stream or track, using the "Jump To" menu - left clicking anywhere in the Display View screen paused the playback. But in "Blue Ray Menu Mode" left clicking on a "track name" started that track playing and clicking on a stream name caused MC27 to pause the current track, change stream and then resume playing. So I thought I'd look to see what would happen if I used the Right Click Menu instead of the "on-screen menu" when I tried to switch streams MC ignored me and left the current stream playing but when I tried to use "Jump To" to change tracks disaster struck MC appeared to be trying to change track (chapter) dropped into what appeared to be "paused mode" and froze solid.

After kicking MC out of memory I fired up MakeMKV up again but this time I told it to rip the dvd once it had done that I fired up MC and told it to play the .mkv file and then looked to see what Audio Streams were present - it listed the 5 streams MakeMKV had listed [4th Attached Image]. plus of course I was back to having to use the right-click menu to navigate from stream to stream and jump tracks. Then I spotted that MC was telling me I could switch Shuffle On so I tried it and guess what it continued playing in sequential track/chapter no. order!

Since I was getting fed up of listening to the tracks on the dvd/.mkv file I set my flac tracks playing but then Disaster #2 occurred. I'd remembered that you can Audio Analysis on a Video so I told MC to analyse the .mkv file when it got around 40% thru the task playback in MC27 froze with no sound coming out of the speakers. I let the audio analysis finish but MC remained in it's frozen state and needed kicking to get it to close. Once I'd restarted MC I checked the tags in the .mkv file and spotted that the ones I expected Audio Analysis to add were not present so I fired up File Explorer and went looking for a recently created file that i did not recognize and found a JRSidecar.xml file in the sane folder as the .mkv file and opened it in Notepad++ - it contained the tags I had expected to find added to the .mkv file, including an extremely long "Wavefrom" tag then I noticed that although it said there were 2 Channels the "Peak Level (Sample)" and "Peak Level (R128)" tags listed 8 channels:- left, right, centre, sub, sl, sr, rl, rr - and all but the rr channel had numeric values. Unless there is a setting somewhere I haven't yet found I could not get MC to display the .mkv waveform in the player window

This got me wondering if there was anywhere else MC could be "presenting" misleading/wrong info and so went back to getting MC to play the MKV file and then the DVD and it didn't take me long to spot something "unusual" happening in the player window.
When playing the .mkv regardless of the stream being played the bitrate changed every second but the sample rate was always 96khz and the channel count was always 2.
Then I switched to playing the DVD when using "Title Playback Mode" the bitrate changed every second but there was no sample rate or channel count showing. When I switched to the "Blu-Ray Menu" the bitrate climbed while the menu was loading but once the 1st track started changing it did not change regardless of which track or stream was playing plus the sample rate and channel count were always blank.

Hendrik:

--- Quote from: EnglishTiger on October 07, 2020, 02:22:49 pm ---Then I fired up MC27 and told it to play the DVD and switched to the DolbyAtmos Stream and used the right click menu to see what Audio Streams MC was seeing - it had 4 - the DTS Surround 5.1 stream was not present and the DD Surround 5.1 was listed as ac3 and had the word [sub[ behind it [2nd Attached Image]

--- End quote ---

That seems to be working as expected. Those tracks that are nested one level deeper in MakeMKV (The DTS 5.1 and DD 5.1) are not "normal" tracks. The DTS 5.1 track is being created by discarding all HD information from the DTS-HD track, and its not actually a track by itself, and MC will never show it - since it doesnt actually exist. Its the HD track with less information. The DD 5.1 track is a sub-track contained inside the TrueHD track for compatibility (hence the sub marker). Oh and AC3 is just an alternate name for DD (Dolby Digital).

On the other hand, in Blu-ray Menu mode, the menu logic determines which streams are available, which can be different to title playback or playing a ripped MKV, where MC actually looks at the media file and decides itself which streams will be offered. This can be different because the menu might hide a certain stream, or it might present one differently then the media file actually contains it.


--- Quote from: EnglishTiger on October 07, 2020, 02:22:49 pm ---When playing the .mkv regardless of the stream being played the bitrate changed every second but the sample rate was always 96khz and the channel count was always 2.

--- End quote ---

The bitrate of video or compressed HD audio is not constant. It changes over time. Thats perfectly normal and will depend on the kind of track you are playing. The Stereo PCM track for example has constant bitrate, the DTS-HD or TrueHD tracks are variable bitrate.

In general, video files where you can swap the active audio track are going to be far more dynamic and depending on when you change the track the information may not match the database. MCs database only has one channel field, but if your video file has 3 streams with different channel count, which is it to display? It'll either pick the first or try to pick the highest quality based on various factors. Then if you change the active track, MC will know that, and when you then analyze the audio, it might analyze audio for a different track (ie. the one you selected) instead of default, which can cause differences in the analysis compared to eg. the channel count in the database.

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