Posts by fat-tony

  • [8.0.2e] LibreELEC 8.0 for S905/S905X

    Tim_Taylor - you're kind of dragging the thread off-topic by comparing DACs. On the Amlogic boards, most users are passing through digital data on the audio side and letting their AV amps do the conversion with their on-board DACs. If you need to send audio to a conventional analogue amplifier, then the hifiberry would have a role.

  • [8.0.2e] LibreELEC 8.0 for S905/S905X

    Quote from Tim_Taylor


    My setup:
    4k Video = Amlogic box running Libreelec
    Highres Audio = Raspberry PI + hifiberry running Libreelec

    Audio hardware of Amlogic isn´t HiFi :rolleyes:

    I don't use Amlogic for analogue output. The DAC in my amp takes care of that! You're presumably running analogue stereo via RCA jacks into an audio amp? I have a requirement for multichannel audio, so I need HDMI for that. S/PDIF will only handle two channel PCM.

  • [8.0.2e] LibreELEC 8.0 for S905/S905X

    Quote from Tim_Taylor

    Amlogix box and hires audio ?
    Don´t belive it´s working fine.

    Did You try hifiberry ?

    It's working with 6 channel PCM audio at 192kHz. Not perfect as there are still occasional "ticks" happening on the rear channels sometimes. I'm sure stereo will be sorted out with a bit of audio driver tweaking.

    Hifiberry? Isn't that a Raspberry Pi build? Won't give me 4k video in the same package. I have two RPi's and they are used for 24x7 duties elsewhere on my LAN. The advantage with the LibreELEC build from kszaq for the Amlogic is that it is pretty much plug'n'play.

  • upsampling 44.1kHz music to 48kHz

    ippon - I answered your post in the main 509/509X thread. I'm not sure why you have the issue in Kodi 17 and not in Kodi 16. Either way, you are using the S/PDIF interface whereas I am using HDMI, so results will be somewhat different. S/PDIF carries only two channels so is limited to PCM stereo or compressed Dolby/DTS multichannel. That said, it should accept all bitrates up to 192kHz and there shouldn't be any re-sampling going on. You mentioned DLNA in your posts also. That could be confusing the issue also. Have you tried playing the files directly from the box (on a USB stick or SD card)? My situation is that I play FLAC compressed files from a network server over SMB or NFS. No DLNA used.

  • [8.0.2e] LibreELEC 8.0 for S905/S905X

    Quote from ippon

    Hi fat-tony,

    your audio issue seems to be very close to the issue then I have. All 44.1k two channel audio is upsampled to 48k and, if I try to force Kodi to use 88.1k is uses 96k (see my post here thread-1492.html?highlight=44.1). It was solved in one older version (7.0.2.009), but however the fix hat been reverted in all later versions.

    You may can try the version 7.0.2.009 and see if it works better for you.

    I don't think my issue is the same. My 44.1kHz / 48kHz / 88.2kHz / 96kHz / audio is all played back at the correct sampling rate according to my amplifier display. I only have issues with 176.4 / 192kHz stereo output. When I was using Kodi on android Marshmallow (the Chinese box default), everything was being re-sampled to 48kHz, but once I installed LibreELEC most of my audio issues went away. I think your problems may be with a setting error somewhere in Kodi. I will have a read of your issue and see if I can see anything.
    [hr]

  • [8.0.2e] LibreELEC 8.0 for S905/S905X

    Quote from kszaq


    I'm sorry but I don't know how kernel audio driver works and I tinker only with the easiest part. I cannot help with resolving your issues.

    What I can tell is Amlogic audio driver is very, very messy and works only in some configurations. It needs fixing or a complete rewrite.

    There's still some hope that Kwiboo will find some time to work on driver or someone else with knowledge picks this up...

    I did some more testing with downloaded clips. 5.1 audio plays back fine at 192kHz. It's just the stereo audio that won't so I think it's selecting the wrong playback format. Works if I use "fixed" sample rate of 192kHz.

    kszaq - what did you change to enable 192kHz playback on S905X?

  • [8.0.2e] LibreELEC 8.0 for S905/S905X

    Thanks kszaq - I did say it was understandable that I got reprimanded, but you get nowhere if you don't ask :P

    It's a weirdie though as regards the audio driver all right. It just doesn't seem to work with the Kodi code when the audio stream is identified as two channels above 96kHz but seems ok when it's six or more channels. I'll download some test files and do some more digging!

  • [8.0.2e] LibreELEC 8.0 for S905/S905X

    Quote from kszaq

    Some versions ago I introduces changes that might have enabled 192kHz PCM on S905X. :D

    I pulled the old version "C" with non-working multichannel audio, new one is at usual place.

    kszaq - 192kHz Multichannel PCM now seems to be working on my S905X, thanks! I don't actually have any of my multichannel audio files encoded at above 96kHz, but several of my stereo (2.0) audio files are at 192kHz (or 176kHz), so if I "force" the sampling rate in the Kodi menu to be 192kHz my stereo 192kHz files will play back but my amplifier reports 5.1 audio with the centre and back channels silent. When I have "optimum" or "best match" set in the Kodi menu I don't hear any playback on these files.

    However, similar to my S905 I don't have any automatic playback of stereo above 96kHz - only 5.0 or 5.1 audio. Also, there is no option to "force" 176kHz sampling rate which would be used for high bit rate SACD audio (again, mostly stereo).

    I tried to raise the issue with the devs on GitHub, but I got my wrist slapped for raising user issues! I suppose that was understandable, but there is little understanding generally of high bitrate audio. Most people are interested in 4k video and the various Dolby/DTS high bit rate audio rather than lossless PCM. Any devs on LibreELEC forums I could engage with? I think this is just a setting issue within the builds for Amlogic as the actual hardware seems to be capable. I have no such issues with LibreELEC on my ION2 generic board but that box is huge in comparison to these little wonders!

  • [8.0.2e] LibreELEC 8.0 for S905/S905X

    Quote from kszaq


    I've read your post and I'm sorry but I cannot comment on multichannel or high-res audio for two reasons: I don't know know how the driver works and I cannot reproduce the issue due to no equipment. There's a hope that at least some of the issues will be solved with patches from LE developers.

    By the way: I read ALL the posts on Amlogic subforum here but I reply only when I have something to say. ;)

    Thanks kszaq - I bought the S905 on the basis of previous posts which said it supported PCM audio in excess of 96kHz which seems to be the limit on the S905X. It's odd that I can configure Kodi to send 8 channels of audio at 192kHz ok, but the PAplayer (and videoplayer) both seem to fail at setting 2 channel audio at 192kHz. I assumed it was an issue with ALSA, but it may well be a problem with the driver as you say. Is there a forum or link you could recommend where I could follow this up?
    I dealt directly with some of the developers on the Kodi forum and supplied sample files several years ago when they were developing the audio engine for linux. My ION2 board player works perfectly at all audio resolutions with LibreELEC, but it doesn't have any 4k video capability which is why I went down the AMlogic route. So near and yet so far!

  • [8.0.2e] LibreELEC 8.0 for S905/S905X

    Quote from zoltan


    Sorry if I submit the question again: what does tihs command do? Does it fix the frequency to 50Hz forever or I can still change it by kodi settings menu?
    Thank you for reply

    This just sets the initial frame rate to 50Hz. Kodi can override this when playing back videos with different frame rates providing you have set the option.
    If you want the boot up frame rate to go back to 60Hz just run the fw_setenv commands with 60 instead of 50.

  • [8.0.2e] LibreELEC 8.0 for S905/S905X

    Quote from 2re


    Dose anyone else have problems with multi channel PCM???

    Disabling passthrough or playing multi channel AAC/FLAC i get distortion and/or random noise. Especially with 7.1.
    Skipping back/forth sometimes fixes the problem, but it will also cause the problem.

    -2re

    I've had no issues with multi-channel PCM FLAC files (providing the sample rate is not > 96kHz) apart from some minor occasional low volume clicks in the rear speakers when playing 3.0 or 5.0 files in some of the older builds. I don't think I've had any clicks in the past few builds at all. I don't have any AAC files.

  • [8.0.2e] LibreELEC 8.0 for S905/S905X

    kszaq - after my problem with my S905x box not supporting audio rates higher than 96kHz, I have sourced a cheap Tronsmart S95 Pro. This is an S905 box with 1GB RAM, 8GB flash and 1GB ethernet. I've used the appropriate device tree gxbb_p200_1G_1Gbit.dtb and everything is working fine from SD card - wireless, BT, ethernet, remote etc.

    However, I have a continuing issue with high-def sound which is in excess of 96kHz sampling rate. I have several stereo flac files ripped at 192kHz from my DVD-Audio disks which are detected by Kodi as 192kHz 2.0 and it seems to initialise the sink correctly but no sound is output to my AV amp. With the s905X box it was downsampled to 96kHz but with this box - no output. I can force the sample rate to 192kHz in the Kodi System/Audio menu and then the sound is output correctly on the L & R channels at 192kHz but the sink is initialised as 8 channels depending on the speaker configuration (7.1). I'm not sure if it's a bug in Kodi or something I can tweak in the settings. Ideally I would set "best match" in the Kodi settings and then let Kodi output to the AV amp at the relevant sample rate and number of channels contained in the source file. I noticed that in the "Fixed" sampling rate settings in Kodi I can use 44.1, 88.2, 96 and 192kHz but not 176.4kHz. Is this an omission as I have several high-bitrate SACD files at 176.4kHz.

    snip of the Kodi log showing the setting of fixed bit rate of 192kHz which allows playback of stereo through my AV amp:

    snip of the log showing automatic setting of sample rate to two-channel 192kHz which results in silence through my AV amp:

    The only difference I can see is that the initialisation is "surround51:CARD=AMLM8AUDIO,DEV=0" in the working example and "front:CARD=AMLM8AUDIO,DEV=0" in the example where no audio is output.

    Full log here - log-2017-03-08-11.16.43.zip

  • [8.0.2e] LibreELEC 8.0 for S905/S905X

    Quote from Franco888999


    Hi,
    is there someone that can tell me how to change the output frequencies (even when it's booting) from 60hz to 50hz?
    The kodi settings seems to be ignored, I don't know why.
    If I play a video it goes from 60Hz to the correct refresh rate and could be ok, but if I use the pvr Tvheadend every time I change the channel it switch to 60hz immediatly and after 3-4 seconds switch to 50hz that is the correct one (I'm in europe).
    Thank you.

    Franco - I had a similar query regarding default frame rate. As it should be 50Hz for European users (who use TV), rather than 60Hz. See post #509 for details.

    The "fix" is to modify the u-boot settings by telnet/ssh into the box and issuing the following:

    Code
    fw_setenv hdmimode 1080p50hz; fw_setenv outputmode 1080p50hz

  • [8.0.2e] LibreELEC 8.0 for S905/S905X

    kszaq - I'm presuming that the DAC is somehow involved in the transfer of the digital data from the input file (stereo FLAC at 192kHz) to the HDMI interface (PCM) even though there is no actual conversion to analogue? I would have thought the DAC was not involved as the data is always in the digital domain. Having looked at the specs, there would appear to be no actual DAC in the s905.
    [hr]

    Quote from GeToChKn

    Says who, no s905x chipset has 1GB ethernet in it AFAIK. Only 100mbs/. It's the specs of the chip.

    You're right - mixing up my boxes there. 100Mb/s (It's 1Gb, not 1GB by the way. You're mixing up your SI units!)

  • [8.0.2e] LibreELEC 8.0 for S905/S905X

    Quote from kszaq


    S905X is (currently) limited to 96kHz due to on-chip DAC, S905 can output up to 192kHz.

    OK... So I'm not losing my marbles :P I knew I had seen something, somewhere about this.

    It's a really weird downgrade (sonically) for the s905x. I wonder why that is the case? I have more need of excellent sound capability than HDR video at present. Maybe I'll look around for a now really cheap s905!!!
    GeToChKn - my s905x does 1Gb ethernet, so no limitation there.

  • [8.0.2e] LibreELEC 8.0 for S905/S905X

    I'm struggling with this issue also - I set HDMI as I have 24bit multichannel FLAC files (up to 96kHz) and stereo FLAC files (up to 176kHz and 192kHz) but I can't seem to get more than 96kHz out. GeToChKn seems to get 192kHz working on an s905, though.

    Clip from my system log which seems to indicate that my system tops out at 96kHz:

    Clip from my Kodi log which indicates HDM capability at 192kHz:

    I seem to be getting 96kHz max out of HDMI even when I specify a fixed 192kHz output in the audio settings menu. As I posted earlier in the thread I thought I had seen a limit mentioned in some other thread but I can't find it. Maybe kszaq will clear it up?