How does CinemaVision recognize Atmos/DTS:X content for audio bumpers?

[midgetspy 2]

When I play an Atmos movie CinemaVision plays a Dolby TrueHD audio bumper. Is there a particular naming convention or something I need to follow to get it to play an Atmos audio bumper? Same for DTS:X.

 

Thanks.

[Ragnarok 198]

7 hours ago, midgetspy said:

When I play an Atmos movie CinemaVision plays a Dolby TrueHD audio bumper. Is there a particular naming convention or something I need to follow to get it to play an Atmos audio bumper? Same for DTS:X.

 

Thanks.

Currently, Kodi doesn't technically support Atmos, DTS:X or Auro 3D. Here's a list of supported formats. Once support for Atmos and other immersive sound formats are added, we'll add support for automatically detecting those formats. There's no naming convention required for those formats to display. What I would suggest is editing the settings of your Audio Format Bumper Module to play Atmos bumpers. Now that I think about it, there might be another solution that could work for Atmos and DTS:X. 

Currently, Dolby Atmos is upscaled audio from Dolby TrueHD 7.1 which is typically found on Blu-rays. DTS:X capable equipment scales everything DTS-HD Master Audio to DTS:X. Think it might be helpful to have toggles in the add-on configuration that you could turn on if you had an Atmos or DTS:X capable theater that would play Atmos or DTS:X bumpers when Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD Master Audio was detected?

[midgetspy 2]

11 hours ago, Ragnarok said:

Currently, Kodi doesn't technically support Atmos, DTS:X or Auro 3D. Here's a list of supported formats. Once support for Atmos and other immersive sound formats are added, we'll add support for automatically detecting those formats. There's no naming convention required for those formats to display. What I would suggest is editing the settings of your Audio Format Bumper Module to play Atmos bumpers. Now that I think about it, there might be another solution that could work for Atmos and DTS:X. 

Currently, Dolby Atmos is upscaled audio from Dolby TrueHD 7.1 which is typically found on Blu-rays. DTS:X capable equipment scales everything DTS-HD Master Audio to DTS:X. Think it might be helpful to have toggles in the add-on configuration that you could turn on if you had an Atmos or DTS:X capable theater that would play Atmos or DTS:X bumpers when Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD Master Audio was detected?

Yeah I know it's not supported in Kodi but I thought maybe CinemaVision was detecting it by file name for the time being. Personally I would like Atmos/DTS:X trailers to only play on Atmos/DTS:X enabled movies (not all TrueHD/DTS HD-MA).

I haven't really been following the development of this addon - is it open source? If I were to add this functionality could I contribute it back?

[midgetspy 2]

14 hours ago, Ragnarok said:

Currently, Kodi doesn't technically support Atmos, DTS:X or Auro 3D. Here's a list of supported formats. Once support for Atmos and other immersive sound formats are added, we'll add support for automatically detecting those formats. There's no naming convention required for those formats to display. What I would suggest is editing the settings of your Audio Format Bumper Module to play Atmos bumpers. Now that I think about it, there might be another solution that could work for Atmos and DTS:X. 

Currently, Dolby Atmos is upscaled audio from Dolby TrueHD 7.1 which is typically found on Blu-rays. DTS:X capable equipment scales everything DTS-HD Master Audio to DTS:X. Think it might be helpful to have toggles in the add-on configuration that you could turn on if you had an Atmos or DTS:X capable theater that would play Atmos or DTS:X bumpers when Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD Master Audio was detected?

I re-read your post and just wanted to clear up what might be a misconception about Atmos and DTS:X: they are NOT just upscaled TrueHD or DTS-HD Master Audio, they are their own format. While an Atmos-capable receiver can upscale Dolby TrueHD 7.1 into more channels that is a different process than playing an actual Dolby Atmos soundtrack.

Dolby Atmos is an extension of Dolby TrueHD. A soundtrack can be Dolby TrueHD 7.1 or it can be mastered with Dolby Atmos (which is encoded as Dolby TrueHD + extra information).

Similarly DTS:X is an extension of DTS-HD Master Audio - a soundtrack can be DTS-HD *or* it can be DTS:X (which is encoded as DTS-HD + extra information).

Kodi does support playing Atmos and DTS:X content it just doesn't support tagging the content. So if I play a movie with a real Atmos soundtrack my receiver detects it and displays "Dolby Atmos"; if I play a movie with a regular TrueHD soundtrack my receiver displays "Dolby TrueHD".

So what I want is for CinemaVision to differentiate between a Dolby TrueHD movie and a Dolby Atmos movie and play a bumper accordingly. Currently Kodi's tagging can't tell the difference between those two (but my receiver can). So my proposal would be to detect "Atmos" in the filename and do it that way until Kodi is able to tag them differently.

[OTA 78]

I'm not sure how CV or Kodi detect the audio format to begin with, but what about having it just read the .nfo file for the audio format?  The information is already there and would be easier than renaming all your movie files.

[Ragnarok 198]

On 2/20/2016 at 4:26 PM, midgetspy said:

I re-read your post and just wanted to clear up what might be a misconception about Atmos and DTS:X: they are NOT just upscaled TrueHD or DTS-HD Master Audio, they are their own format. While an Atmos-capable receiver can upscale Dolby TrueHD 7.1 into more channels that is a different process than playing an actual Dolby Atmos soundtrack.

Dolby Atmos is an extension of Dolby TrueHD. A soundtrack can be Dolby TrueHD 7.1 or it can be mastered with Dolby Atmos (which is encoded as Dolby TrueHD + extra information).

Similarly DTS:X is an extension of DTS-HD Master Audio - a soundtrack can be DTS-HD *or* it can be DTS:X (which is encoded as DTS-HD + extra information).

Kodi does support playing Atmos and DTS:X content it just doesn't support tagging the content. So if I play a movie with a real Atmos soundtrack my receiver detects it and displays "Dolby Atmos"; if I play a movie with a regular TrueHD soundtrack my receiver displays "Dolby TrueHD".

So what I want is for CinemaVision to differentiate between a Dolby TrueHD movie and a Dolby Atmos movie and play a bumper accordingly. Currently Kodi's tagging can't tell the difference between those two (but my receiver can). So my proposal would be to detect "Atmos" in the filename and do it that way until Kodi is able to tag them differently.

You know, you're right. I should've been a bit more clear. I wasn't saying that Atmos and DTS:X aren't their own format. I was tying to say that there currently isn't a ton of media available with those codecs built in. In both cases, they knew that there was going to have to be some kind of backwards compatibility and upscaling built in to each product to compete and develop going forward. Since the majority of Blu-rays are actually encoded with DTS-HD Master Audio and Dolby TrueHD, they are upscaled using the processor in your AVR to Atmos and DTS:X. Going forward, I'm sure the immersive formats will be the standard, but as it sits today, that's not yet the case. I'm sure once those immersive codecs are widely deployed, the Kodi team will add support for them and we'll be able to detect them at that level instead of relying on the AVR.

My thought, and I might be oversimplifying this, is to allow users to specify that their AVR is Atmos and/or DTS:X enabled. Instead of relying on file name tagging which takes quite a bit of time to index and process when you have tons of media and is prone to human error, you would enable a toggle in settings that tells CinemaVision to process Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio tracks as their new immersive counterpart since it's going to be upscaled to the immersive format anyway. As for media encoded with the immersive formats, that would just pass through like normal. Since Kodi effectively sees that media as Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD Master Audio, and the option for those immersive formats is enabled in CinemaVision, the immersive format bumper would be selected automatically. No file name tagging needed, no human error. I think that would be a good stop-gap until we can detect the format in Kodi. Thoughts?

[midgetspy 2]

1 hour ago, Ragnarok said:

You know, you're right. I should've been a bit more clear. I wasn't saying that Atmos and DTS:X aren't their own format. I was tying to say that there currently isn't a ton of media available with those codecs built in. In both cases, they knew that there was going to have to be some kind of backwards compatibility and upscaling built in to each product to compete and develop going forward. Since the majority of Blu-rays are actually encoded with DTS-HD Master Audio and Dolby TrueHD, they are upscaled using the processor in your AVR to Atmos and DTS:X. Going forward, I'm sure the immersive formats will be the standard, but as it sits today, that's not yet the case. I'm sure once those immersive codecs are widely deployed, the Kodi team will add support for them and we'll be able to detect them at that level instead of relying on the AVR.

My thought, and I might be oversimplifying this, is to allow users to specify that their AVR is Atmos and/or DTS:X enabled. Instead of relying on file name tagging which takes quite a bit of time to index and process when you have tons of media and is prone to human error, you would enable a toggle in settings that tells CinemaVision to process Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio tracks as their new immersive counterpart since it's going to be upscaled to the immersive format anyway. As for media encoded with the immersive formats, that would just pass through like normal. Since Kodi effectively sees that media as Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD Master Audio, and the option for those immersive formats is enabled in CinemaVision, the immersive format bumper would be selected automatically. No file name tagging needed, no human error. I think that would be a good stop-gap until we can detect the format in Kodi. Thoughts?

It seems to me that if a user wants the behavior you specified they could already achieve it by placing the Atmos trailers in the TrueHD folder (and DTS:X trailers in the DTS-HD folder)?

Personally I want the audio trailer to differentiate between native Atmos content and standard 5.1/7.1 TrueHD content (which may or may not be upscaled depending on my AVR settings). I think we probably both agree that that's the behavior that CinemaVision would want in the long term, the question is whether it's worth implementing with filename tagging until Kodi is able to tag the formats natively. My vote is yes and I'm happy to do the work if the source is open :0)

[Ragnarok 198]

1 hour ago, midgetspy said:

It seems to me that if a user wants the behavior you specified they could already achieve it by placing the Atmos trailers in the TrueHD folder (and DTS:X trailers in the DTS-HD folder)?

Personally I want the audio trailer to differentiate between native Atmos content and standard 5.1/7.1 TrueHD content (which may or may not be upscaled depending on my AVR settings). I think we probably both agree that that's the behavior that CinemaVision would want in the long term, the question is whether it's worth implementing with filename tagging until Kodi is able to tag the formats natively. My vote is yes and I'm happy to do the work if the source is open :0)

I'm hesitant to add hard-coded filename tags, and I'll tell you why.  Once the tags are in the code, we won't be able to safely remove them without disrupting some people's experience when the ability to autodetect the immersive formats is added to Kodi. One of the things we have planned is the ability to use filename tags in the conditions for the Command Modules, so that might be a route to go with this. That way there are no hardcoded tags in the add-on, and it opens users up to a endless filename tagging possibilities.

CinemaVision is absolutely open source, but we have to audit what we commit and will likely change some things. We want to stay in the Kodi repository to be available to everyone, and that takes some work. You are of course welcome to make changes to your local files. We have a few users that do that. Make sure that if you do that, you track those changes so you can easily restore them when we make updates.

[midgetspy 2]

1 hour ago, Ragnarok said:

I'm hesitant to add hard-coded filename tags, and I'll tell you why.  Once the tags are in the code, we won't be able to safely remove them without disrupting some people's experience when the ability to autodetect the immersive formats is added to Kodi. One of the things we have planned is the ability to use filename tags in the conditions for the Command Modules, so that might be a route to go with this. That way there are no hardcoded tags in the add-on, and it opens users up to a endless filename tagging possibilities.

CinemaVision is absolutely open source, but we have to audit what we commit and will likely change some things. We want to stay in the Kodi repository to be available to everyone, and that takes some work. You are of course welcome to make changes to your local files. We have a few users that do that. Make sure that if you do that, you track those changes so you can easily restore them when we make updates.

Thanks. I've forked it on git, I'll take a look.

I personally wouldn't be too worried about the backwards compatibility because assuming a user only changed the filenames on files with actual Atmos/DTS:X audio there would be no disruption. Kodi would tag the content correctly (once it was able to do so) and then when CinemaVision switched from filename detection to audio tag detection the user wouldn't even notice. The only case where somebody is disrupted by the removal of the filename tags is if they'd added Atmos/DTS:X to the filename of files that were not actual Atmos/DTS:X.

In any case thanks for the response, I will take a look at the code and maybe maintain my own fork with changes for myself.

[Ragnarok 198]

1 hour ago, midgetspy said:

Thanks. I've forked it on git, I'll take a look.

I personally wouldn't be too worried about the backwards compatibility because assuming a user only changed the filenames on files with actual Atmos/DTS:X audio there would be no disruption. Kodi would tag the content correctly (once it was able to do so) and then when CinemaVision switched from filename detection to audio tag detection the user wouldn't even notice. The only case where somebody is disrupted by the removal of the filename tags is if they'd added Atmos/DTS:X to the filename of files that were not actual Atmos/DTS:X.

In any case thanks for the response, I will take a look at the code and maybe maintain my own fork with changes for myself.

You're right about that. I also did some digging and it looks like the good folks behind FFMPEG have been working on parsing Atmos and DTS:X streams for about a month now. I'm not sure when it will be working, but at least we know it's coming. Once FFMPEG is updated and can identify those streams, we'll have full support.  If you make changes, feel free to submit a PR and our developer will look them over and make whatever changes are necessary to keep us compliant. We appreciate the help!

[midgetspy 2]

9 hours ago, Ragnarok said:

You're right about that. I also did some digging and it looks like the good folks behind FFMPEG have been working on parsing Atmos and DTS:X streams for about a month now. I'm not sure when it will be working, but at least we know it's coming. Once FFMPEG is updated and can identify those streams, we'll have full support.  If you make changes, feel free to submit a PR and our developer will look them over and make whatever changes are necessary to keep us compliant. We appreciate the help!

Great, thanks: https://github.com/CinemaVision/script.cinemavision/pull/4

[Ragnarok 198]

On 2/23/2016 at 0:11 AM, midgetspy said:

Great, thanks: https://github.com/CinemaVision/script.cinemavision/pull/4

It's been merged. We're just waiting for it to show up on the Kodi repository!