44.1khz Lossless Options

[borisanddoris]

So here's my problem:

I use Kodi (Leia) as my playback device and for multichannel LPCM or FLAC files, it will send them to my receiver as 44.1khz with no resampling, same goes for AC3, DCA, TrueHD, and DTSMA.  The problem I am running into is that if the .mkv is 2 channel 44.1khz, it always wants to resample and output to 48khz.  I have tried all variations on the audio settings for Kodi and the ShieldTV to no avail.  Rather than upgrade to a new version which breaks some other customizations I've done to the skin for cinematic playback, I'd rather look at encoding to a format that supports this sample rate.  I know old school DTS wav can, and it appears TrueHD and AC3 can as well.  I gave it a whirl with an old version of the Dolby Media encoder first but it keeps erroring out saying "invalid sample rate".  Currently trying 640kbps AC3 which should do just fine.  At what point is that mild compression worse than re-sampling it which is doing who knows what to the original audio?

In the end, I'm just trying to avoid any resampling at all on these stereo tracks so I don't introduce anything bad in the audio signal.  

Of course, this could all be moot because at my age, I probably couldn't tell the different between the original wav/flac vs. a 384 kbps AC3 encode.  

[spoRv]

I'd rather keep untouched, uncompressed source, and let the player re-encode it on the fly, instead of compress it to preserve the 44.1kHz...

[stwd4nder2]

I think this is more of an issue with Kodi and/or the Shield. I have one in my setup, and it outputs in stereo 48khz as a default unless you're outputting another format such as bitstream or multichannel PCM. I assume it would be a simple addition in kodi to force it to output 44.1khz when playing stereo, assuming the Shield is even capable of doing so.

I'd keep using FLAC/WAV, it's the best format for the use-case and it's not worth it using something else to bypass an issue that might eventually get fixed in a Kodi update.

[alleycat]

Complete side track but with my kodi/shield pro setup I have to use Krypton 17.6. With anything post 17.6, if I enable passthrough, I get micro stutter on all video. It was driving me up the wall, I went through every forum post I could find and no matter what settings I changed it was the same. Installed a third party app that was supposed to fix it but it still happened. Panning shots were especially annoying for it as I got quite sensitive to noticing it. Turn passthrough off and it was fine. So in the end I went back to 17.6 and now I notice it like 2-3 times throughout the movie. I also get micro stutter when watching netflix via the shield.

[bronan]

This isn't unusual, it's probably happening to way more people than even realize it. For instance, if you run your player into the TV first before amp its almost guaranteed to be resampled. Realistically though there is most likely no audible difference. If you're going to take the time to re-encode it you can just resample it to a 48kHz FLAC with eac3to. A site was posted a while back with resampling tests run on pretty much every major program and eac3to passed all the tests with zero distortion.

[borisanddoris]

That's good to know that eac3to has a quality resampler. I know I'm splitting hairs with all this but I'm a geek, and we just tend to do these things.

I did do a test just for fun and encoded a 2 channel 44.1khz to DTS wav to preserve the sample rate. Flipping back and forth, it was impossible to tell the difference on my system. The only nice thing about bitstreams vs. flac/lpcm is that my receiver always plays the bitstreams with no dial norm 4dB louder. This is of course expected and fine, but can become a pain when I'm playing a playlist with mixed content and having to ride the fader.

[bronan]

That sounds cool, what program are using to encode the DTS?

[borisanddoris]

A rather old version of DTS HD Encoder Suite. What I did was encode as a DTS WAV in there and then used wav2dts to parse it into a nice, clean, .dts file for muxing.

It made me feel like someone in 1998 creating these for DTS LaserDisc. Haha.