September update breaks 5.1 Audio

[sam_nazarko]

Hi John,

First, I’d like to just say that I can’t fix problems that I’m not made aware of.

In August, I see that you posted about a Bluetooth streaming issue. Bluetooth however is still experimental and that’s why we don’t yet include it in OSMC out of the box. There is a slight risk that it won’t function as expected sometimes; and it isn’t regression tested fully across updates at this time because some further changes are planned.

I wouldn’t recommend basing your decision not to update OSMC on an experimental package.

Can you confirm whether your audio issue is still present in the September version of OSMC? There were a few audio fixes to fix a couple of problems introduced in the July update when we enabled Atmos and 192Khz support. The main problems introduced here were an incorrect channel mapping for LPCM and muted channels. I understand that this is now fixed.

@john_murray

I realise that the August and September issues possibly solve the DVBlink loading sticking but I simply do not have the energy/will/stamina to reinstall the latest and be faced with the audio problem and then upload another log -

I didn’t find a post from you about DVBLink issues, so didn’t know that you were afflicted with this problem. There were some improvements to Live TV playback in the September update, and the reports have been quite positive.

@john_murray

@sam_nazarko I know you do your best and that clearly is a lot more than most - you seem to be ever present - all plaudits to you for that but if every update of OSMC brings a separate new problem then whats the future?

You cannot have a situation where you first discover a problem when you sit down to watch something. On the other hand it is impractical to expect every user to test every channel each time a new update happens.

Obviously we want to avoid regressions; but they are inevitable. In the unlikely event they do happen we try and fix things quickly. For example, there was a disk automounting issue last night on Raspberry Pi devices; but this was resolved within twenty minutes and made available to users within half an hour.

@john_murray

For example in the 9 hours I spent yesterday trying to clean and stabilise my set up, I got ‘internal error’ on DVBlink more that 12 times - no way of knowing what and only a reboot solved it.

This suggests that there might be a problem with your DVBLink backend here; but I am not the best person to help resolve that. The DVBLink forums might help you with that one.

@f0o

All this being said, perhaps maintaining 4 (?) platforms is a bit much for a handful of volunteers. I’d suggest building up a QA team to test releases prior availability to the general public. Even make the QA Team open so that anyone can join and report in, the only requirement I’d make is to have an account here or on IRC and fill out a brief detail about one’s setup. This also needs a simple opt-in/out option for the end-users.

We effectively have this in the form of the staging repository; which we often suggest people use to test immediate fixes. I’m aware that there are some people using this test repository as a daily driver.

All of the updates that we release have been tested by some users before their release. You can find notes on the audio changes in the thread I linked to in my previous post.

Sam