JRiver Media Center Owner's Thread - Page 8

I went back to JRMC last night and switched to Red October HQ. Unfortunately I couldn't get any video, only audio. This is from a DVD ripped to Vob files in the standard way... I think I've seen some mention of this bug in the latest build on the Interact forum. For the time I went back to 7MC to watch that title, but I'd still like to give JRMC a fair go.

Regarding the replies above on tagging, I don't doubt the power of what is there, but it shouldn't be hard to have the basic stuff just picked up without intervention. Nice to know you can then go further manually. This is a commercial offering and I'm thinking as much of J River as my own needs. Deal with usability and interface issues like this and there will be a much greater uptake and income stream.

Desert,
Are you using the daughter card for analog output of the surround channels?

I currently use both of my Xonar DX cards and my E-MU 1212 card for analog output straight to power amps for stereo and it sounds wonderful for albums, movies and TV.

I've wondered if multichannel analog output is possible also.

My mistake. I am not on the most recent build. Will update and try again.

This build fixes that problem:
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=65976.0

Sorry for the trouble.

I am getting a lot of crashes trying to setup MC 16, using latest build. It did the same thing on a previous build, so I removed it and reloaded the latest. Often it would crash after booting up. Now it crashes when I try to play an mkv file. Seems very unstable on my pc, but don't know why. I've been running Media Portal as a front end and rarely experienced any issues with my large libraries. Perhaps there is a driver conflict. I removed sharks codecs plus Media Portal hoping to eliminate possible conflicts. Same issue. Any suggestions on getting help? Win 7 Pro on a i7 system.

Sorry about that. Try this thread:
http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Stability

I suppose its easyer to explain what I want to do rather than go through all the details first-

I want to explore the option of using my pc as the audio processor, instead of a rip off external one (easyer as that might be!) so will be looking for lossless audio over analogue out. I was under the impression that only the hdav deluxe could output all the lossless formats over analogue outs? If you can copy a dll file over, surely you can use other cards with 24/192 capability??? Either way the solution must be in J River, its the only player that does everything properly for me.
That xonar hdav is very confusing.

What your audio card can really convert is all in its DAC.

J.River can decode all HD audio formats losslessly (DTS-HD only with the help of the ArcSoft decoder from TMT, as explained above), so the digital signal is as perfect as it gets. Now if you want to convert that to Analog, thats really not in the responsibility of your player anymore, as long as it offers you the ability to send the digital audio untouched to the hardware. The hardware does not care what codec was used for the audio, in the end it only gets decoded and pure digital PCM, up to 24/192.

What you are thinking about is a limitation in TMT3. It is limited, so that it can only output 24/192 with certified hardware (probably licensing stuff). That limitation does not apply to J.River, and the analog out should be as good as the DAC on your card permits.

Ive read so much stuff that says you cant do that because of hdcp ....soooo confused!!!

I have a old 192/24 PCI creative x-fi music 7.1 capable sound card kicking about, your saying this can output all hd audio files in J river uncompressed, and not just the core tracks? PAP has been removed?

Yes, thanks to the skill and dedication of guys like nevcairiel who work on open source splitters, decoders and renderers. My thanks to you all!

SBR

What your mind is stuck in is playing a retail Bluray through a retail Bluray Player software which requires HDCP and PAP. Now, just imagine that through some magical combination of software, , you've managed to backup your retail Bluray to your hard drive and oh, by the way, the DRM requiring HDCP has managed to be forgotten along the way, , into a folder structure, an .iso or an .mkv. Well, at that point HDCP and PAP are no longer required and any player capable of decoding or bitstreaming the HiDef audio is free to do so. So, yes, your HDAV will play that DTSHD Master soundtrack in all its 24/192 glory!

And for further reading I might suggest googling AnyDVDHD and Bit Torrents.

Yes, it can.
J.River can only play un-encrypted Blu-rays (and only without menus), and for those, there is no HDCP.

Now, if you want to play a encrypted Blu-ray, you need a software like AnyDVD HD to do a live decryption.
But if you set that all up properly (J.River + AnyDVD HD + the DTS-HD decoding helper), you get full audio quality, untouched, without HDCP or PAP.

It looks like Nevcairiel answered your question. However, I noticed you mentioned lossless analog output a couple of times. The two terms, lossless and analog don't quite go together.

Are you also thinking about bit-perfect audio reproduction? If you're running XP, look into ASIO4ALL or a card with an ASIO driver. You can also run your system on Vista or Windows 7 and use WASAPI.

Since JRiver MC can output to ASIO drivers/sound cards, I use cheaper Xonar DX cards in two of my systems, and a nicer EMU 1212 in my main PC, all using ASIO drivers. This bypasses the Windows kernel mixer and sends an unmodified bit stream directly to the sound card (and yes, on XP it actually made an audible difference). All three of these cards yield high quality, noiseless, analog output that can be sent directly to power amps or a receiver.

Thanks for pointing this out. I was under the impression JRiver stayed within the J River>Media Center 16 directory structure and did not use any pre-exixting (or outside or JRiver folders) programs/filters/splitters/etc.

I put a copy of dtsdecoderdll in the "external" LAV folder as well.

I think Ive been looking at too many old threads!

I dont know what to say......
wow.

I looked into the hd audio aspect of using computers a couple of years ago, and it was a no go. Looks like things changed!!!

Where would I get the dll file for the hd audio formats as I havent bought tmt?

...Right, the best 5.1 sound card I can get for reasonable money....hmm....do I spend out on getting a 12 channel firewire jobby so I can run diy active speakers in the future or not!!! If only someone made a soundcard with the sabre 32 dacs!

The EMU 1212 is 2 channel analogue out right?

Bloody hell, why doesnt everyone run this program!!

The program doesn't advertise itself well. It's probably the best kept secret in HTPC.

To be fair, you can pretty much get the same result from any competent DirectShow player, assuming proper setup.

J.River just makes all this much easier for you by providing the auto-configured filters that do all this for you.

Nev,
I think you've hit on what my be JRiver's major feature. High to very high quality results, typically right out of the box, no tinkering necessary.

While the tagging capabilities required several days of intense work (I'm a noob to tagging).

The actual setup involving high quality sound and video were trivial compared to XBMC (over a year ago, it's probably improved by now).


lbaccoustics,
The EMU 1212 comes with a daughter card for L+R main outputs. You're right about only 2 analog outputs. I found mine here.
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/cont...=REG&A=details

If you wanted to, you could use the 1616m dock and have excellent 5.1 analog output.

Yes, I am using the daughter card and output directly to my amps. Actually, a few weeks ago I bought a Steinberg MR816x firewire audio device and am using it now instead of my Asus Essence ST and H6 daughtercard. You can read my "review" at the J. River forums.

Thanks desert. And a nice review too.

Ha Ha, round and round I go- I just read that review having found a audiofire 16 cheap, I was wondering if it would compare to alternatives. Seams your not too fond of it.


I have found a 1616m cheap too! But this wouldnt give me the future option to run active speakers that the audiofire would.

Neither option seams to give the measurements of the new asus cards though.

Just to clarify, your first quote is J. River's own location for the filters they automatically setup, like LAV Audio. They do not make any filter changes outside the Plugins folder. However, they can overwrite anything within their Plugins folder.

If you downloaded a manual installation of LAV Filters and placed the dtsdecoderdll.dll file in that folder, too, then J. River's usage of LAV Audio will not look in that external folder for the file. However, LAV Audio will always look in the Windows\\System32 or Windows\\SysWOW64 folder for the dtsdecoderdll.dll file if it isn't present in J. River's LAV folder.


The terms go together just fine. lbaccoustics wants to decode the DTS-HD lossless track and output it via his analog outputs on the soundcard. You used to be able to only decode the lossy core of DTS-HD tracks unless you had the right hardware/software combination. With some software you could decode the DTS-HD, but it would be downmixed to 16-bit/48Khz. Now we can easily decode the lossless DTS-HD track and output it however we want (PCM via HDMI or Analog) without worrying about using the correct hardware/software combination. The only caveat is that the Blu-ray must be unencrypted with software like AnyDvd HD.

Back to video and just DVD at that... pleased to say I used Red October HQ last night and DVD replay picture quality was exceptional. I'm sold!

I agree, I was realizing what you guys were talking about as I wrote that.

I just meant that once the signal is converted to analog, losses are occurring, the original digital signal is changed and can never be recovered. Really a trivial point with the high quality of the analog output the better sound cards are yielding now days.

cool,
Done all the jiggery pokery with the .dll files, how do I know if its worked? 'The dark knight' is showing 30,000 kbps at the top of the screen when playing- not sure if that answers anything?

That's likely the total or video-only bitrate. I still haven't been convinced that I'm decoding losslessly, since mc reports bitrate of ~1500kpbs. However when I bitstream and confirm I'm seeing dts HD ma, it still has the same bitrate. Even mediainfo can't give me word on the HD audio bitrate except to say it's variable.

The HD bitrate is variable, thats why most everything shows the core bitrate, estimating the HD bitrate is really not easy.

Play a 7.1 track, or one with 96000 Hz, if those come out the decoder, you can be sure it worked.

Ideally, Red October should allow access to the LAV Audio status page, though.

Thanks, Nev. I figured that it had to be something like that. Cheers.

Thanks peeps!

Does Theater View support sets? IE there are 20+ James Bond movies. When I'm browsing my movie collection I'd like to see one James Bond instead of all of the JB movies. If I select James Bond I then get a screen with all of the James Bond movies. This is referred to as Movie sets in XBMC.

For me I find it reduces the clutter and makes finding movies in a large collection much easier.