MMH - New Atmos Decoder (beta) discussion

[SeeMoreDigital]

The issue is that the channel named Side Left was actually the back left channel, not the side left channel.
View attachment 97205

Indeed... And then at around the same time, Dolby and DTS extended their original 5.1 layout to 6.1 (ie: Dolby Digital EX and DTS-ES), which introduced a dedicated speaker or speakers behind the listeners head...

 

[jonnyboio]

Indeed... And then at around the same time, Dolby and DTS extended their original 5.1 layout to 6.1 (ie: Dolby Digital EX and DTS-ES), which introduced a dedicated speaker or speakers behind the listeners head...

If you do a sound check in Windows, the sides will play as the rears, and vice versa.
It's all a cluster F. But a well known one.
Fortunately the pc audio apps don't suffer from the same.
I call the side speakers left & right side surround in a 7.1.4 setup. Don't care what else they are called by the various entities.

I'm specifically talking about the files produced by this decoder. It names the side channels "back" and the back channels "side", the opposite of what they should be named.

 

[HomerJAU]

The Dolby Atmos channel order is sides before rears. When decoding to wav the default channel order is that. There is an option to swap that order in the decoder dialog if you want that order.

 

[jonnyboio]

The Dolby Atmos channel order is sides before rears. When decoding to wav the default channel order is that. There is an option to swap that order in the decoder dialog if you want that order.

The issue is not the order of the files but the naming of those files. They are named incorrectly, side channels are named BL/BR and rear channels are named SL/SR. Side channels should be named Ls/Rs (Left surround/Right surround) and rear channels should be named Lsr/Rsr (Left surround rear/Right surround rear) or Lrs/Rrs (Left rear surround/Right rear surround) per industry standard. Both the Dolby Media Encoder and the DTS Encoding Suite use that naming.

Preferably the front channels should just be named L C R as opposed to FL FC FR to adhere to industry standards, but that's not incorrect, just preference.

 

[HomerJAU]

The issue is not the order of the files but the naming of those files.

So you want the mono files created by MMH Atmos Helper’s decoder tool to be named as above?

 

[antipoof]

Hello Some files cannot be decoded. when I open the file in DRP with presentations on auto/2/6/8 the file is played, but on 16 there is an error. I hope you can solve this little problem

 

[jonnyboio]

So you want the mono files created by MMH Atmos Helper’s decoder tool to be named as above?

Yes, that would be great.

Also, it would be awesome if you could add support for higher channel counts (ideally 24.1.10) but I assume that's a limit of the Dolby Reference Player.

Hello Some files cannot be decoded. when I open the file in DRP with presentations on auto/2/6/8 the file is played, but on 16 there is an error. I hope you can solve this little problem

It will be much easier to solve this if you provide more info than "something's wrong".

 

[HomerJAU]

Yes, that would be great.

The latest MMH 7.1.4 release has mono files named with Dolby channel abbreviation.

Also, it would be awesome if you could add support for higher channel counts (ideally 24.1.10) but I assume that's a limit of the Dolby Reference Player.

Correct. The DRP does 9.1.6 (16 channels) maximum.

 

[jonnyboio]

The latest MMH 7.1.4 release has mono files named with Dolby channel abbreviation.



Correct. The DRP does 9.1.6 (16 channels) maximum.

Thank you for adding that, but unfortunately it seems the filenames are still incorrect; left surround is labelled Lrs while left rear surround is labelled Ls.

Also I'm getting an error message when decoding 9.1.6 to mono WAVs:

If I try decoding to a multichannel WAV I just get "Wav Conversion failed". It worked fine on the previous version.

 

[antipoof]

Thank you for adding that, but unfortunately it seems the filenames are still incorrect; left surround is labelled Lrs while left rear surround is labelled Ls.

Also I'm getting an error message when decoding 9.1.6 to mono WAVs: View attachment 98493
If I try decoding to a multichannel WAV I just get "Wav Conversion failed". It worked fine on the previous version.

Hi,

Try to open this in DRP whit presentation 8. If open with 8 and no with 16 be patient the next release.
I have this error too.

 

[HomerJAU]

Thank you for adding that, but unfortunately it seems the filenames are still incorrect; left surround is labelled Lrs while left rear surround is labelled Ls.

Dolby channel order is sides before rears. If you want to reverse the order check the checkbox in MMH Atmos Helper decoder dialog.

Also I'm getting an error message when decoding 9.1.6 to mono WAVs
If I try decoding to a multichannel WAV I just get "Wav Conversion failed". It worked fine on the previous version.

I’ll look at this today and get release a fix (It’s probably related to ffmpeg 6.1 being used in latest MMH).

EDIT 7.1.5 fixes this. It was an issue in MMH introduced in 7.1.4 to allow for ffmpeg 6.1 changes. My bad.

 

[HomerJAU]

Thank you for adding that, but unfortunately it seems the filenames are still incorrect; left surround is labelled Lrs while left rear surround is labelled Ls.

I found the issue and fixed in todays 7.1.5 release

 

[HomerJAU]

Hello Some files cannot be decoded. when I open the file in DRP with presentations on auto/2/6/8 the file is played, but on 16 there is an error. I hope you can solve this little problem

Version 7.1.5 release today has a new option to allow setting the 'TrueHD channel Presentation'. Previously in MMH Atmos Helper this was hard coded to 16. Users can now set it to 16, 8, 6 or 2.

NOTE: Users cannot set this to less than the number of channels in their 'Channel Layout" setting.
Example: For Channel Layout '5.1.4' (10 channels) it cannot be set to 8 or less.

 

[jonnyboio]

I found the issue and fixed in todays 7.1.5 release

Thank you very much for fixing this. Can also confirm that decoding 9.1.6 works perfectly in the latest release (7.2.6).

Possibly bug (that's not really a big deal as it won't affect me): when decoding an MKV the files were just named Output-01, Output-02 etc. and the decode was wrong. Didn't do much testing, might have been caused by the the MKV having three tracks (TrueHD Atmos, DDP Atmos, and DD 5.1). No big deal, I usually extract the tracks anyway.

One last request would be to support .thd files so I don't have to rename them to .mlp before decoding, as that's the filetype gMKVExtract gives the TrueHD track.

 

[HomerJAU]

One last request would be to support .thd files so I don't have to rename them to .mlp before decoding, as that's the filetype gMKVExtract gives the TrueHD track.

That should be easy enough.

Possibly bug (that's not really a big deal as it won't affect me): when decoding an MKV the files were just named Output-01, Output-02 etc. and the decode was wrong.

Can you please provide a little more info and I’ll check it out.

 

[jonnyboio]

That should be easy enough.

Awesome, thank you.

Can you please provide a little more info and I’ll check it out.

Here's the MKV I used: Dolby Atmos Test Tones 7.1.4.mkv
Decoding it resulted in a bunch of weird files, I didn't spend a lot of time looking into exactly what's wrong but I could tell it was wrong. Extracting the TrueHD track first worked perfectly.

I found another issue: if I split an MKV into several parts with MKVToolnix and extract the .thd files, only the first part works. I don't know if this is fixable or if it's an inherent issue with DRP. Splitting is useful for certain workflows like only extracting a few tracks from an album.

 

[HomerJAU]

I’ll check out the first issue tomorrow.

Splitting Dolby Atmos streams with current tools causes issues with the DRP. The workaround is to use a MKV with chapters. MMH will send the whole file to DRP to decode to wav then split the wav into chapters defined in the MKV.

 

[HomerJAU]

Here's the MKV I used: Dolby Atmos Test Tones 7.1.4.mkv
Decoding it resulted in a bunch of weird files,

This is because MMH Atmos Helper always splits MKV files with chapters into chapter wavs.

I have just changed thus behavior, in next release (later today v7.1.7). There is now a new checkbox to 'Split MKVs with Chapters'. If this option is checked and the file is an MKV with > 2 chapters the decoded output multichannel interleaved wav file is split into separate wavs at the chapter times in the source MKV file:

 

[Tibblouder]

Is it possible to add 16 individual wav files to the atmos helper? Any help
I can only add a .w64 file with 16 channels to be able to create an atmos file

 

[HomerJAU]

The Atmos Helper currently only supports encoding from multichannel interleaved files.

You could create a MCH interleaved file by modifying this ffmpeg command line below from 6 mono file input to your 16 mono files:

ffmpeg -i front_left.wav -i front_right.wav -i front_center.wav -i lfe.wav -i back_left.wav -i back_right.wav
-filter_complex "[0:a][1:a][2:a][3:a][4:a][5:a]amerge=inputs=6[a]" -map "[a]" MCH.wav

Use the ffmpeg.exe in the MMH6 folder and change the 6 -i arguments above to be all 16 of your input files and the -filter_complex part to have 16 maps. In both cases in the example above only 6 inputs and 6 outputs are shown. Also change the inputs=6 to =16

Garry