Same AAC problem. "Dark Knight.mov"scratch and silence…
OK, Ryan suggested one more change, I built a new binary. Please try this one:
afp://dn-0.com/samples/Outbox/XBMC-ac3-2.zip
Minor change, the bitrate has been reduced down to 448kbps just in case the older receivers were having trouble with the 640kbps streams.
No Elan, no luck for me.
Still remain the Helicopter
For me no helicopter but still scratch and silence like the version before.
Hi,
Same as everyone else - blue surround light, dolby 3/2 on the receiver display, but still no sound (silence). However I don’t get a few milliseconds of ‘scratch’ if I skip forward like I did on the previous build(s)…
Cheers
Jon
Not entirely sure if it’s connected, but…
If I play dolby digital 2.0 encoded files in XBMC, it seems to interpret them as 5.1, so I get dolby 3/2 on the receiver display and the multichannel light… But no sound…
In VLC they are seen as 2.0 encoded and play as per normal…
jon, I've got the STR-DB920, which is the previous model to what you have. I have the same setup with mac mini, etc, and the same problems. Fun stuff. :(
I think that we're pretty close. tokyovigilante should be able to take my work and finish it off. Cross your fingers. I really want the blue light **and** sound at the same time! I only get the blue light and no sound. :)
Any news about the issue? I’ve got a Creative Inspire DTS-5500 (it’s old, I know… :unsure: ) and I’m experiencing the same issue with AC3 encoded audio. No audio at all in digital mode, and the receiver doesn’t even detects the AC3 stream (it stays on “stereo”).
Short answer - no, but we're working on it.
Basically there's incomplete for devices that use Mac OS' system support for digital outputs (think Mac Mini/Macbook with integrated digital outs). Some receivers can cope with this, some can't. Most external (USB/Firewire devices) work ok.
Unfortunately I've had the most to do with 5.1 digital sound, but don't have any hardware that doesn't work to be able to debug, and so far our efforts to integrate better with CoreAudio haven't been successful. Hopefully this will change in the next week or so, and Brandon and I'll be able to get to the bottom of it for everyone's benefit.
Rest assured, as soon as we know, you'll know.
Ryan
(PS: In the meantime if anyone wants to buy me a Mac Mini for testing, that'd be just fine ;))
With the last release of Plex, remain mine problem : the Helicopter sound in AC3 mode.
No lucky for me
No luck for me too. No helicopter but silence at movies with AC3 (5.1) sound. :(
We actually put quite a bit of work into fixing it, but no luck yet. Kudos to Ryan and Brandon for all the time they’ve spent on this and all the kernel panics they’ve caused.
If I can help testing the malfunctioning devices let me know. I’ve both an old AC3 receiver from Creative and a MacMini. When I try to output AC3 digital audio via toslink I only get silence or strange noises.
Still no luky for us with the latest release 
… my damned receiver…
I had also hoped, but not yet. One day I’m sure it will happen, until then VLC…
Hey all,
I have access to some pro audio analysis tools, so as soon as I can get my hands on a mini-toslink to toslink cable I’ll play some streams out of my macbook pro and see if I can see what’s wrong with them.
My assumption is that the AC3 stream must be fine because the rest of our receivers can decode the stream. My guess is that the problem is in the AES (SPDIF) stream and that the “bitstream” flag is not being set - this is the flag that tells the receiver whether the incoming stream is PCM or a bitstream (AC3, DTS, etc.). I think on modern-day receivers they’re smart enough to not care whether this flag is set. This is because AC3 has a sync-word at the beginning of each frame that can not occur in normal audio, so the receiver knows when it sees this sync word to switch to bitstream mode. This also explains why some people here a “snat” before they get audio - the receiver is parsing the AC3 stream as audio before detecting that it’s a bitstream. Another guess would be that the “pre-emphasis” bit in the AES stream is set and would cause the receiver to garble the data pre-decode (but this is a long shot).
I’ll see if I can understand this a bit more in the next week or two. I wish I had the time to contribute some code, but at least I can help in this way. 
I hope someday it will be fixed…
However I’m planning to buy a new audio receiver since mine does not support DTS
Hey bud, it turns out you're entirely right. The problem is the audio library we currently use (PortAudio) lacks the capacity to enable the AC3 bitstream flag, because its CoreAudio implementation isn't complete.
Brandon and I have been having a lot of difficulty integrating the AC3 modeswitch into PortAudio, to the point that it will be easier to replace this with a direct CoreAudio output module. This is non-trivial as well, but rest assured that I am working on it, and hopefully it will be sooner rather than later.
Thanks for your input! (I wish I'd known this two months ago ;))
Ryan
Hey man!
still remain the helicopter with the latest release… but… Today i’ve downloaded the XBMC Windows Atlantis beta (xbmc.org) and it works fine!!!
the experiment :
- XBMC Atlantis for Mac -> Scrap Audio
- XBMC Atlantis for Windoze -> Perfect Audio in DD5.1
The system is the same : Minimac 2ghz -> Leopard in partition 1 and Windoz-Bootcamped in partition two.
So, the Recevier works fine… i thing there is a problem with the “Audio driver” into kernel, mybe no?
See you
Yeah, it’s absolutely a low-level issue. Ryan is working hard on it, and we’ll hopefully have some good news for you in the near future!
