FireTV box 1st gen - any recommendations for settings?

[sirmcftv]

I will mess with it again once I have some free time. I hate it when work gets in the way of my hobbies!

In the past I read something to the effect that some AAC audio is poorly encoded and it reports only 2 ch in the stream metadata even though it really is 5.1, perhaps that's what I was dealing with at the time that I could never get it to work. Not sure whether MrMC/Kodi attempt to detect multiple channels in the stream or they just trust metadata.

Are there any test videos that you or others use to confirm a setup? Something where one could test various combinations of video + audio encodings and formats, well known to be encoded correctly as we can't do much about poor media.

[davilla]

see this kodi thread https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=51024

[sirmcftv]

see this kodi thread https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=51024

Thank you!

[sirmcftv]

Still no debug yet, I have not had a chance to play any videos yet.

Multichannel PCM makes sense, but I was never able to get it to work, in the sense that I'd like my AVR to show 5 ch "MULTI CHAN" on its display for the input, it always says 2 CH and does its own Dolby Pro Logic mode no matter what I tried to set the number of channels in past versions of Kodi, that's why I configured the transcoding to AC3. Perhaps I should try with MrMC again.
I've seen the AVR show "MULTI CHAN" before when I played with the decoding in a Blu-Ray/DVD player so I know it's possible.

Is there a trick to it beyond setting 5.1 channels in the audio output setup in MrMC (I do have "only" a 5.1 setup even though the AVR can do 7.1)?

Try it, set channels to 7.1 and see what your Denon does with it. Again, debuglog is always helpful it figuring out what MrMC is actually doing.

Tried a quick test, setting channels to 7.1 and 5.1 / best match and all I get is 2 channels on the AVR. I will have to get a debug log when I have a bit more time. Is the Fire TV 1st gen known to support 5.1 PCM?

Also if I set the output to 5.1 or 7.1 in MrMC, when GUI sounds are played shouldn't the AVR show more than 2 ch input even though the actual sounds may be just on the L/R channels?

[koying]

Hehe... I confirm the 24p bug is still there in FTV1.
Spent some hours trying to find out why vsync was crazy before assuming it was a FW issue

[davilla]

Hehe... I confirm the 24p bug is still there in FTV1.
Spent some hours trying to find out why vsync was crazy before assuming it was a FW issue

logcat still shows the vsync timeout ?

[sirmcftv]

Hmm, I upgraded my 1st gen to 5.2.4.1_r2 and MrMC was able to switch refresh rates, at least my TV showed 24Hz. Didn't spend too much time with it or looked at the logs because I don't really care for refresh rate switch, I'm happy to keep it on 60 all the time if the playback is smooth.

My main pain point now is not being able to get 5.1 PCM to my Denon AVR

[davilla]

Switch refresh rates was never a problem once we added that ability. It's switching to the proper refresh rate at is the issue. The fireOS thinks it is 23.97 but the kernel thinks it is something else.

[sirmcftv]

Switch refresh rates was never a problem once we added that ability. It's switching to the proper refresh rate at is the issue. The fireOS thinks it is 23.97 but the kernel thinks it is something else.

But my TV showed 24Hz - does that mean it worked or are there playback issues because the kernel may think it's something else?
(not near the setup to try it again)

[davilla]

Switch refresh rates was never a problem once we added that ability. It's switching to the proper refresh rate at is the issue. The fireOS thinks it is 23.97 but the kernel thinks it is something else.

But my TV showed 24Hz - does that mean it worked or are there playback issues because the kernel may think it's something else?
(not near the setup to try it again)

As I mentioned, it will switch to 24Hz but the kernel vsync timing is not correct.