DTS Express Support in Vero 4K

Help and Support Vero 4K / Vero 4K +
1

I am a first-time Vero 4K owner, and it’s also my first device using OSMC.

Does the Vero 4K support ‘DTS Express’ encoded audio? I encountered my first Blu-ray title (The Fast and the Furious) that uses DTS Express stereo audio for the ‘Commentary’ track. I own the Fast and the Furious blu-ray title, which I have ripped to an mkv container. It is the mkv file that I am playing from within Kodi via windows file share. The main tracks are DTS-HD MA (#1) and DTS 5.1 (#2).

When I select that DTS Express track in Kodi, there is no audio, and the screen also freezes. But if I change back to the main audio tracks, the movie and audio resume playing.

I have quite an old 1080i LCD tv with limited audio support, so I am dependent upon the Vero 4K to handle the audio for me. If I convert the DTS Express audio track to ac3 using ffmpeg, and add that ac3 track to the .mkv file, the ac3 track plays fine. This is my short-term workaround, but I’d rather not have to do this as it looks like several other “Fast and Furious” follow-on movie blu-rays also use DTS Express for the Commentary.

Kodi 17.1
OSMC 2017.03-1
Here’s a bit of info about the track from ffmpeg (note: I added the metadata title for clarification):
Stream #0:1(eng): Audio: dts (DTS Express), 48000 Hz, stereo, fltp, 187 kb/s (default)
Metadata:
title : Stereo Alternate Commentary by Director John Singleton
BPS-eng : 192000
DURATION-eng : 01:47:41.866666666
NUMBER_OF_FRAMES-eng: 75725
NUMBER_OF_BYTES-eng: 155084800
SOURCE_ID-eng : 001A00
_STATISTICS_WRITING_APP-eng: MakeMKV v1.10.5 win(x86-release)
_STATISTICS_WRITING_DATE_UTC-eng: 2017-04-18 00:52:01
_STATISTICS_TAGS-eng: BPS DURATION NUMBER_OF_FRAMES NUMBER_OF_BYTES SOURCE_ID

And from MPC-HC:
ID : 2
ID in the original source medi : 6656 (0x1A00)
Format : DTS
Format/Info : Digital Theater Systems
Format profile : Express
Mode : 16
Format settings, Endianness : Big
Codec ID : A_DTS
Duration : 1 h 47 min
Bit rate mode : Constant
Bit rate : 192 kb/s
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Channel positions : Front: L R
Sampling rate : 48.0 kHz
Frame rate : 11.719 FPS (4096 spf)
Bit depth : 24 bits
Compression mode : Lossy
Stream size : 148 MiB (1%)
Title : Stereo Alternate Commentary by Director John Singleton
Language : English
Default : Yes
Forced : No

Thanks for any guidance.

2

Hi

Haven’t seen a clip with DTS Express encoding before. I was always under the impression that it was mainly used for things like PIP or extra features where there are constraints on audio bandwidth.

Can you PM me a sample so I can look at this?

Might be a limitation of Kodi & ffmpeg at this stage.

Cheers

Sam

3

Hi Sam - I will extract a sample and send to you. Thank you for the reply.

4

ok, so in the process of preparing a sample that demonstrates the issue, I believe I have figured out the problem.

I found on one of the Fast & Furious discs a (relatively) smaller Special Features title that had a DTS Express audio track. When I ripped that with makemkv and copied straight to my share, it played fine. So I tried to recreate the original problem and was successful, which mistakenly led me to think it was a file size thing. I then re-ripped the full-length blu-ray title containing the DTS Express commentary, which is, in the makemkv view, a completely separate copy of the main title except it has that DTS Express audio track. That played fine. Hmm.

I had been using ffmpeg to remux. When I used mkvtoolsinx-gui to remux, the problem didn’t occur, and the DTS-Express audio played fine. I then re-examined the ffmpeg output during the muxing and saw “Timestamps are unset in a packet for stream 0…” and “Starting new cluster due to timestamp” warnings. I believe whatever those warnings mean is what causes my muxed title with DTS express to not play. When I mux the exact same combination of audio tracks using mkvtoolsnix-gui, the movie plays fine.

So sorry for the false alarm as I don’t have any evidence that osmc/kodi are at fault; I think it’s something with ffmpeg.

5

Thanks for following up with this and confirming