5.1 Surround Audio Channel Mapping and PAPlayer

[Thrung]

I have recently installed XBMC4XBOX 3.5 (having been using XBMC 2 for years), and have a problem with 5.1 Surround audio. If I play back .AC3 or multi-channel .OGG files using MPlayer or DVDPlayer then the six channels map correctly through the Optical link to my amplifier, but with PAPlayer the wrong speakers are used, mapping as follows:

• Front Left maps correctly to Front Left
• Front Right maps correctly to Front Right
• LFE maps correctly to LFE

but

• Centre audio comes from Rear Left
• Rear Left audio comes from Centre
• Rear Right audio is not heard

Could this be a bug in PAPlayer, or an obscure setting somewhere that I've missed?

[Thrung]

Are the contacts and developers for PAPlayer different from those of XMBC[4XBox]? The channel mapping in 3.5 seems to be wrong and consistently so in 3.5 versus 3.3.3 and 2, which may be a DLL issue or may be a coding issue. XBMC logs show nothing of PAPlayer's activities, just that the .AC3 and .OGG have been handed off to it for playing, so I don't know what kind of diagnostics to provide, nor to whom. The issue arises with different skins. I can't think what other variables may cause this. My advancedsettings.xml in Version 2 contains:

Code: Select all

<advancedsettings>
  <video> <!-- "VideoSettings" instead of "video" for builds prior to May 22, 2006 -->
    <smallstepbackseconds>5</smallstepbackseconds>  <!-- Length of the small skip back (normally the BACK button) when playing a video -->
    <smallstepbacktries>3</smallstepbacktries>
    <smallstepbackdelay>300</smallstepbackdelay>
    <usetimeseeking>true</usetimeseeking>  <!-- Whether to use time based or percentage based seeking. -->
    <timeseekforward>30</timeseekforward>  <!-- Time to seek forward in seconds when doing a short seek.  Defaults to 30. -->
    <timeseekbackward>-30</timeseekbackward>  <!-- Time to seek backward in seconds when doing a short seek.  Defaults to -30. -->
    <timeseekforwardbig>600</timeseekforwardbig>  <!-- Time to seek forward in seconds when doing a long seek.  Defaults to 600 (10 minutes). -->
    <timeseekbackwardbig>-600</timeseekbackwardbig>  <!-- Time to seek forward in seconds when doing a long seek.  Defaults to -600 (10 minutes). -->
    <percentseekforward>2</percentseekforward>  <!-- Amount to seek forward as a percentage, when doing a short seek.  Defaults to 2. -->
    <percentseekbackward>-2</percentseekbackward>  <!-- Amount to seek backward as a percentage, when doing a short seek.  Defaults to -2. -->
    <percentseekforwardbig>10</percentseekforwardbig>  <!-- Amount to seek forward as a percentage, when doing a long seek.  Defaults to 10. -->
    <percentseekbackwardbig>-10</percentseekbackwardbig>  <!-- Amount to seek forward as a percentage, when doing a long seek.  Defaults to -10. -->
    <blackbarcolour>0</blackbarcolour>  <!-- colour of the black bars (0->255), (black->white) on videos. -->
  </video> <!-- use "VideoSettings" instead of "video" for builds prior to May 22, 2006 --><musiclibrary>
 
  <musiclibrary>
    <allitemsonbottom>true</allitemsonbottom> <!-- sorts the "*All" items at the bottom of the list when in Ascending order -->
    <hidecompilationartists>true</hidecompilationartists>    <!-- only shows primary album artists when at the unfiltered artist listing -->
    <albumssortbyartistthenyear>true</albumssortbyartistthenyear>    <!-- at an albums listing, when you sort by artist, secondary sort will be year. -->
    <albumformat>%B [%Y]</albumformat>  <!-- album label template, default is "%B" -->
    <albumformatright>%A</albumformatright>  <!-- album label template for right column, default is "%A" -->
  </musiclibrary>

 
  <videolibrary>
    <allitemsonbottom>true</allitemsonbottom>  <!-- sorts the "*All" items at the bottom of the list when in Ascending order -->
  </videolibrary
</advancedsettings>

Version 3.3.3 and 3.5 have no advancedsettings.xml.

What would help would be if anyone else can test and either confirm or deny the observation. A surround test .AVI can be found at http://download.tfm.ro/w32/test_ac3.rar from which the .AC3 may be easily extracted (using, for example, AVIDemux).

Builds

• pre-9.1.0 r21142 (Compiled: Jun 26 2009) - works
• 3.3.3-r32589 (Compiled: Oct 27 2013) - works
• 3.5-r32977 (Compiled: Oct 14 2014) - borked

[Dan Dar3]

@Thrung
You may have hit this - the comment says "removed", but I think they have been technically removed from the paplayer source directory and actually using the DVDPlayer ones.
http://redmine.exotica.org.uk/projects/ ... ions/32751

On the other hand, you could maybe try map .AC3 and .OGG extensions to play with DVDPlayer, see a post here that goes through similar:
http://www.xbmc4xbox.org.uk/forum/viewt ... 850#p24851

only that in your case is not a stream, so maybe something like this:

Code: Select all

<playercorefactory>
  <rules>
    ...
    <rule name="ac3|ogg" filetypes="ac3|ogg" player="DVDPlayer" />
  </rules>
</playercorefactory>

[Thrung]

Great help, thanks Dan Dar3. I doubt I'd have found that reference on my own.

If PAPlayer can't/won't/doesn't play multichannel audio, and most of my audio is OGG (no matter how many channels), mapping OGGs specifically to DVDPlayer probably isn't worth the effort, I might as well set my default player for all audio as DVDPlayer or MPlayer. I'll have a search, try to find a comparison table that lists the pros and cons of each player, to be sure I know what I'm missing by choosing one over the other.

[BuZz]

some changes were made that may have affected channel mapping with multi channel stuff on paplayer. Please open a ticket on the bugtracker (with a debug log).

for now you can just do "play using" and choose dvdplayer for multichannel stuff. To be honest, our PAPlayer needs some work and has had little attention over the years. DVDPlayer handles it better.

[Thrung]

Bug #336 created. Good luck.