Sorry, I probably could have worded that a bit better to avoid confusion. When your in fullscreen playing an audio only file the name of the Kodi GUI window your looking at, regardless of if there is any kind of visualization plug-in actively going, is called “visualisation”. The point being that you can switch the program the audio is running through but that doesn’t make Kodi switch what it uses for the GUI element. I had added a bit to my previous post with an action id that should change the track if Kodi has the ability and is just lacking the GUI setting to do so. I don’t have a file at hand to check it right now myself.
Thanks for that. Maybe when you have the time you could check multiple audio streamed MKA files and their behaviour. It seems there is a ‘disconnect’ between the GUI and player being used to play/select different audio streams, as far as a audio only file is concerned, i.e. MKA files aren’t handled properly by Kodi.
There are several issues Kodi seems to have with MKA files, so that’s not a surprise, unfortunately.
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I made a test file and tried my potential workaround I posted above and it didn’t work. I believe what this means is that there would have to be some lower level changes make to Kodi before someone could expose this option via a skin. I then tried removing .mka from the music extension list and add it to the video extension list. This made my file show up in the video section but it did not make it change to playing in the video interface. I would guess it likely decides which to use based on if there is a video track present or not.
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The buttons are all there in skins, but Kodi itself enables or disables them… There’s nothing a skin can change about that, unfortunately.
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I’ve been doing the following to my bluray rips with good success:
- use handbrake to generate an mkv, include all the audio tracks you are interested in (as passthough for DTS or dolby tracks)
- add mkv to music extensions in advancesettings.xml
<musicextensions>
<add>.iso|.mkv|.mlp|.mid|.kar|.mod|.s3m|.xm|.it|.mptm|.stm|.nst|.m15|.stk|.st26|.ice|.wow|.ult|.669|.mtm|.med|.far|.mdl|.ams|.dsm|.amf|.okt|.dmf|.ptm|.psm|.mt2|.dbm|.digi|.imf|.j2b|.gdm|.umx|.xpk|.ppm|.mmcmp</add>
</musicextensions>
(In my case I added a ton of other non-standard extensions as well)
-
Generate a .cue file (album.cue), and point it at the mkv file. (picard has an extension that can generate cue files, add the mkv file to the album song list in picard (as whichever song your mkv starts with), then generate the cue. will likely need to edit it afterwards to remove all of picard’s “dupes”. I generally add in “Album Name (BDA)” or similar as the album name to help identify the version (my skin recognizes most multi-channel indicators in the album name and displays icons for them)
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Index as normal music. And it shows up in the music library. Note There is some funkyness in indexing if you have multiple versions of an album, you may need to strip out the MusicBrainz AlbumGroup tag, because kodi will sometimes see 2 versions of an album when indexing, and ignore the one it thinks is a dupe, also may need to ensure that you append something to the album name to make it different)
-
When playing, you can use the “play using” option to either choose to play it via paplayer, which will always play the 1st audio track in the file, using the MusicVisualization window, (use mkvmerge to re-order the tracks if you want), or choose to play using the video player, which will play it as video, allowing you to change audio tracks, as well as displaying whatever (usually cheezy) graphics the BDA came with. When playing again in the future, Kodi seems to remember which one you played it with the previous time (making that the default for that album)
I have noticed that PAPlayer will crash after a couple songs sometimes for things like DTS-MA (PAPlayer has always been touchy about the more esoteric codecs), so I generally just select to play with videoplayer.
I’ve also occasionally gone the route of using mkvmerge to rip out each audio track from the mkv, and separate the songs into indivudual mka files (using chapter breaks), but there’s a lot more work required for that. (also need to do things like strip out chapters in mka files afterwards, and may-or-may-not still require a .cue file to index them.
I do not know if that is a real usecase. I mean why would anybody on earth choose flac over DTS-HD track? If he has nothing instrument to play DTS-HD than it was meaningless to choose an .mka with DTS-HD instead of a simple flac track. If he has the ability to play DTS-HD he shall not play it as a flac. Either way not much of a point to select within the .mka.
I can confirm that, however in Kodi for windows I have experienced no crash at all when playing .mka files regardless it was PAP or videoplayer. Only the slider and the remaining time indicator seemed hopeless. I have found no way to switch between 2.0 and 5.1 tracks within the .mka but as long as I am concerned I will never be missing that.
The problem as described in the first of your posts was to do with an MKA file containing a DTS-HD 5.1 and FLAC 2.0 audio streams, hence the discussion around that from a technical stand point.
I quite often prefer hearing the stereo version (i.e. FLAC 2.0) over a multi-channel version, as the latter is not necessarily always the best. Besides an MKA container file may contain any number of different audio streams, typically multichannel FLACS, different flavours of Dolby & DTS and so on, when ripped from a blu-ray.
So this is a valid use case and in the spirit of Kodi/OSMC. I think that the flexibility that an MKA file container offers (in the same way that the MKV container offers for video+audio) should and could be supported better.
You are quite right, sometimes even I prefer 2.0 on my audiophile amplifier (Exposure 3010). The only reason I have not paid too much attention to this type of switching was because it was not possible thus I just accepted it and tried to enjoy what was available i.e. the 5.1. soundtrack.
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