Yep, that seems like a separate issue, still.
Honestly, I don’t know what it will take to get this issue fixed, but it’s a real issue and it affects so many popular movies so it’s a little unfathomable that it’s not a priority to fix by the Kodi devs.
It’s not that it’s “not a priority to fix”, but rather an issue of time… The Kodi dev in charge of this probably has (real life) issues more important and we have to accept that. It will be fixed eventually, I’m sure. That we’d all like it to be fixed, sure.
You’ll have to excuse me if I don’t share your enthusiasm. I brought up this issue in May, 2018! 
Probably just need to accept that it’s unlikely to ever get fixed.
There’s an issue in that the detailed specs for Dolby Audio are not available in the wild. If I’m wrong and someone can point me to them it could get done without a suck it and see approach.
I know this has been discussed, and I know that many on the Kodi team (all?) do this as a hobby, but I (and many others, I’d imagine) would definitely donate to the team to get this done.
As stated before, money isn’t the issue.
We sell a commercial product and we would happily sponsor this fix for all Kodi users.
We’ve also taken steps at fixing the issue and while we had some improvements in Kodi v17.6, they were negated with the introduction of Kodi v18.
Unfortunately the problem is that the technical lead is pretty much AWOL / time constricted. We can’t improve things further but that is not for a lack of trying on our side.
A positive is that devolving bitstream packing to FFmpeg (which seems to be likely in the near future) will improve situations like this by reducing the dependence on individual developers; downstream projects and expedite the support for newer audio codecs.
I will continue to push. But at this point I’m not pushing for a fix but rather information and implementation specifics. We set up an OSMC chat with anssi in October 2019 and he was response for a while, but real life always takes over.
Sam
Thanks, Sam. I know you’re trying to get this fixed, but I figure occasionally I need to yell a bit so that the Kodi dev team can see that it’s still a serious issue.
(PS Money is always an issue. I bet if I offered up $100k to get it fixed, it’d be fixed tomorrow. :D. That said, I hear you. I guess maybe in another 2 years… )
@sam_nazarko , while we wait indefinitely for a fix, is there a way on your end to get some sort of file analyzer in place? i.e. If the bit-rate of the TrueHD/Atmos track goes over ~10Mbit (approximately when we start seeing issues), a warning before watching would be good. Then at least I could switch to PCM and have the Vero decode the TrueHD (I’d lose Atmos for that movie). That’s preferable to a messed up movie experience…
Cheers.
If you paid $100k, you’d get us a 60 minute conversation with Dolby. They would then tell us:
That’s the OSMC perspective.
If you want to offer $100K on the Kodi forums and not sound like a Nigerian prince (aggressive spam filter), be my guest, but I think you’re misunderstanding the situation.
We’ve looked at it. We understand the problem precisely.
Unfortunately we don’t know how to fix it properly because we don’t understand the original implementation to begin with. We had some improvements which showed some improvement but we don’t know enough to know why we get regressions we do.
I understand the frustration. We always try and improve things where we can, but we also don’t want to give false hope. We don’t see how we can improve things at this time. We keep nagging the original developer for more information.
Sam
I’ve also tried reaching out to anssi about this but he hasn’t replied and as you say must be busy with real life. I hope he is ok.
I am not much of a coder but I’m seriously wondering if I should start at least trying to look at it. I believe the issue is fixed in ffmpeg so swapping the packer to ffmpeg sounds like it may help but I’m sure it’s not that simple.
Add Free Guy to the list of Atmos movies with bad drop outs.
Indeed – apparently this is very noticeable.
Hopefully this helps the issue get more attention.
This thread gives me PTSD. 
Or maybe it’s more like TSD.
I just had this issue for the first time and this is not making me think it will be fixed anytime soon.
“No one is actively working on this from Team Kodi”
Might be time to get a non Kodi device for certain movies …
Bloody annoying, for years now… 
Someone has written a patch for this - can it be installed on the Vero?
You would have to build Kodi yourself to get the patch. Hopefully it will be accepted into the next Kodi release.
EDIT: Looking at the patch it appears that it’s for Kodi V20, so it would have to be back-ported to V19. My CPP isn’t good enough to know exactly how difficult that would be.
It’s probably gonna be back ported as it’s a bug fix… Those are usually also released for the current stable version with a new release. But let’s see - promising indeed!
Someone has already tested the patch on OSMC and reported that it is working.
This is all very good news.
It sounds like free guy being so bad has stirred up enough interest in this bug for the Kodi Devs to look at it.
Terrific news
Will believe it fixed when I see it. 