Boxee Box Owner's Thread - Reviews, tips, tricks, bugs and feature requests - Page 230

randomly my Netflix on my Boxee corrected itself from the wonky interface that had been there in error. Coincidentally I checked my PS3 last night and it had changed to the new interface most people have (and hate)

Any issues you have with being into the beta should be sent to marcel at boxee dot tv. As far as getting 1.1, you have to download it onto a USB drive and then load it into your boxee. There is link in the second sentence of the forum announcement. Look for the word "link", actually. They say it may be a couple of days before they'll have it up for automatic downloading.

Some people on the Boxee forums have been able to upgrade the firmware when checking from the Boxee Box menu. So I guess they started rolling it out to some areas.

Although I never checked mine. I just did it from the USB drive.

I think I'm going to hold off on doing this update in the hopes that they fix the 2.0 audio issue.

can someone confirm that dts core extraction is broken and whether TrueHD is now downmixed to stereo on PCM in the official release?

If yes, then I think this release does more harm than good. Dts core + TrueHD via PCM while not perfect was ok for theater viewing without dropouts. Having the choice of dropouts if we want multichannel audio vs being forced to stereo if we don't want dropouts is absolutely unacceptable.

I AGREE, hope there is a recovery plan!

I've already confirmed the Dolby TrueHD to 2.0 PCM. It happens and it's not good.

If you don't want the Boxee to convert 2.0 PCM to Dolby Digital 5.1 just tell it you don't have a Dolby capable receiver. If you tell it you have PCM instead, that's what it will output.

Boxee, please make a concerted effort to get everything to output properly over PCM. That seems to be the simplest course of action. There are no drop outs, there is no loss in quality and it will just work. But multi-channel sources must remain that way and lossless files need to remain lossless. I hope I'm not asking too much.

I think it depends on the True HD track. I tried a couple of 96 Khz DTHD tracks and it came out as DD 5.1 with audio in the front left and right. So that would be PCM stereo getting converted to DD.

But then I tried the last Shrek BD ISO which has a 7.1 DTHD 48Khz track and that played fine with all channels active. It bitstreamed the 7.1 DTHD like it should. I need to try some other DTHD tracks to see what they do.

UPnP media serving is totally broken in this release - a disaster for those who were relying on it. You can browse what the media server is offering, but you can't play anything

http://jira.boxee.tv/browse/BOXEE-9762

Please comment and vote if this affects you. Given the other backward steps which they have confessed to (in an otherwise excellent release) I can only suppose that pulling UPnP support is an accident rather than by design, but I'm amazed nobody spotted the problem - and if a fix is three months off, I'm not a happy bunny.

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With regard to the withdrawal of volume control, I have started a thread on the Box forum concerning workarounds - there may be people here who might have ideas building on what I've found (namely that you can still send commands like setvolume(80) from a browser or whatever, so the volume control mechanism is still there, but simply disabled from the Box remote).

http://forums.boxee.tv/showthread.php?t=35195

For instance, someone who wants to have the volume permanently set to a certain value other than the normal 100, might be glad of a little web based remote with a box to enter in the figure desired. I'm not clever enough to do that... heh, though maybe I could try!

Note though that the Box resets to 100 on reboot, which is probably the safe thing to do.

I just tried two of the Austin Powers BD ISOs. One has a 6.1 DTHD track and one has a 5.1 DTHD track. The first one I tried had 6.1 and went right to the DTHD track and played it fine with all channels active. Like with the Skrek 7.1 DTHD track. I had resumed from a previous location so I had it on that track at some point I watched months before.

Now the second one started up on the DD track. WHen I trried to change it to the 5.1 DTHD track it had issues, first showing up as multi channel pcm and then I got no audio. So I backed out and started it again using the resume location and it came up in 5.1 DTHD with all channels active.

Now in all these instances where I was bitstreaming the 5.1, 6.1 and 7.1 DTHD tracks I did notice at least one dropout in just the few minutes I played them.

The longest I watched a part of any movie tonight was around 20 minutes. I watched 2012 and it has a DTS-MA track. I did not hear any dropouts during those 20 minutes.

Wackiness for sure

Sean

If you tell the Boxee Box you have a Dolby TreuHD capable receiver it will bitstream the audio and yes it will be multi-channel. If you leave that option unchecked and instead say you have a 7.1 LPCM capable receiver it will output 2.0 stereo with this new firmware. The previous one retained the multi-channel output even in PCM mode.

Yes it is. Didn't they get feedback from the EA testers? I would have thought the PCM to DD and DTHD issues would have showed up right away for the testers.

Or did they change something without sending it to the testers first.

It's certainly much less usable for me now. I can't even use it to watch Netflix now because of the stereo pcm to DD issue.

They did make some good improvements with the interface, but took some steps backward with the core functions.

Thank you for the information. I'll hold off on the firmware update for now.

If they don't know how to fix it, they should just leave it alone for now. It made them look bad by releasing a bad firmware.

Please work with Intel to get proper firmware for HD audio support. Thanks.

Hi everyone,

We've made some changes to the audio. These are all mentioned on the release notes. The changes are due to the license agreement signed between dlink and Dolby:

- all 2 channels PCM audio in now output as dd 5.1 when the receiver is capable. It will not mix into 5.1 but will stay 2 channels as the original input.
- Dolby truehd is decoded only to 2 channels. We will not decode to multi PCM as before. This should not affect bitstreaming.

Regarding Netflix, we plan to move to dd soon, so hopefully this will help.

All other sounds settings should work as before. If you're getting any issues please let me know, or report on boxee forum/jira.

EDIT: There is a known issue when switching to DTS audio while playing (changing an audio track). The audio will not always start. We're looking into this.

Eli.

You guys are shooting yourself in the foot with this one. I can promise that buyers will soon move on to another product if the fundamental part of audio playback is not fixed.
Either you set up PCM to play 1:1 DTS-HDMA and TrueHD or get the bitstreaming to work. People are getting tired now after 6 months.

Sounds like Dolby have sat up and said, "Hey, you're infringing agreements/patents" - and you can't ignore that. And it sounds like it was DLink who should have paid out for a higher level licence rather than Boxee - but then presumably everyone would have had to pay that in part, whether they wanted that feature or not.

Eli, thanks for rejoining the thread.

I'm sure what you're saying is the case, then it becomes even more imperative for the drop out issue to be fixed. PCM was a great alternative and I'm sorry to see it go.

Sorry to hear this Eli, but you folks need to reconsider your agreement and bump up to something that will allow this to go back to the way it was.

I cannot recommend Boxee Box to people with the audio being in this state(Yes it IS that big of an issue to me). 2.0 AUDIO is a HUGE part of what people listen to every day be it from streaming or even many DVD's.

This is one of the main reason I no longer have my Logitech Revue connnected to my TV. It does the same thing and became EXTREMELY annoying to us.

This is pathetic, it makes you wonder if this was the plan all along, and the only reason why it wasn't implemented at first was because TrueHD bitstreaming did not work at launch...

The audio issues have pretty much sealed the deal for me. I'm about to start working on a HTPC and as soon as it's done I'll be putting the BB on eBay. Too bad as it's got lots of potential.

Hopefully they change the 2.0 pcm to DD issue. That coupled with the Dolby True HD isse makes the box almost useless.

I would have to go back to using something else. My Boxee Boxes were becoming the box I used for much of my viewing, but these changes will drastically change that.

The problem I see is that although the Boxee Box may be targeted more towards the average consumer (vs PCH, Dune, etc...) I would guess that most people who are using/supporting the Boxee Box now are not the average consumer but instead the typical AVS consumer. As such HD Audio for many is important (whether bitstreaming or decoding to PCM) and since the Boxee Box cannot do either properly then what exactly are we left with....

Agreed Damian. Even most average consumers probably have at least 5.1 setups these days in at least one room, so they will notice these issues too

Boxee wants to be cutting edge, yet they set themselve back to the 1990's with the way certain audio is being handled. It makes no sense.

It's not only about HD-audio. Dropouts happen with normal DTS aswell.

This is something new then I've never had any dropouts with DTS tracks.

The testers got time to play with it like this. There was a good amount of pleading to at least fix it so stereo wasn't output as DD 5.1. There are a ton of us with nice receivers that do a far better job of this than Boxee. Especially since many, including my Harman Kardon, lose the ability to mix to 7.1 if the source is 5.1 instead of stereo. Even the L/R stereo->5.1 mix is subpar. Most receivers expand the stereo source to the entire speaker constellation instead of just mapping them Left/Right fronts.

Obviously, the requested change didn't get made. I don't understand how stereo->DD 5.1 could be part of some licensing agreement. Did D-Link just decide they don't want to pay for a stereo license? That's the only thing that makes sense.

The other part of the license agreement I wouldn't care at all about if bitstreaming was working like it's supposed to.


It's true, dropouts happen with all audio source types now (even AC3), but are still most prevalent with the HD sources.

Glad you said that. I upgraded yesterday against my better judgement and have noticed drop outs on pretty much any type of file playback no matter what audio format. Plus I've started getting buffering issues as well streaming over the internet. It's like two steps forward and three steps back with this thing.

why, and why?

This is ridiculous. Why is Boxee taking steps backward? I bought this box because of features that I liked that are now being taken away. That coupled with bitstream audio dropouts means there is no way to get a consistent HD audio experience on Boxee Box.

I have