Support for playback of Atmos TrueHD audio in MKA and Atmos eAC3 JOC in M4V formats

Help and Support Vero V
1

I’ve been using Plex on an NVIDIA Shield for years and years to play my movie library and my 5.1 FLAC music library. Over the past few years I’ve been building up an Atmos music library as well and the only way of playing this on Plex on Shield is to use a video library and store them as full albums in MKV format.

As my library has grown significantly, I’ve found storing them in Albums is just not an easy way to access specific songs I want to play for family and friends. I’d like to convert them to MKA or M4V audio-only files (depending on whether they are TrueHD or eAC3 JOC encoded). While this works great in my home office using JRiver on Windows, it doesn’t work on Plex and is apparently a Plex limitation of their music player that they have no interest in fixing.

I was pointed to the Vero V (and OSMC) as the way to do this, but before ordering I wanted to check to confirm that this would indeed work on the Vero V. Could someone confirm that these indeed do work and that I’ll be able to access and play my Atmos music library in my media room with this box?

Thanks!

2

Hi

Kodi has two primary players: VideoPlayer for (video) and PAPlayer for audio.

My understanding is that MKA support isn’t 100% implemented in Kodi, but playback should work. For example: if you want gapless playback, I believe you’d need to use VideoPlayer instead of PAPlayer for playback. At least that was the case at the time.

There’s some discussion here about matters: .mka files containing 5.1 DTS/DTS-HD + 2.0 flac tracks playback issues. Keep in mind that this post is three years old, so I suspect there have been a number of improvements since.

Regarding M4V: I would have expected that to contain video, not just audio. If you send me a sample file, I could check things are doing what they should be doing here.

3

Thanks Sam. I tested the latest version of Kodi over the weekend and it still has problems with MKA Atmos and also M4V e-AC3 JOC Atmos. Appreciate the response.

4

It doesn’t? For MKA you need to use single file with CUE file. No chapters in MKA, just in the CUE file. This gives you TrueHD Atmos gapless playback.

M4A is fine for eAC3 JOC Atmos. What problems did you have?

1 Like
5

No audio track switching is available using the audio player (many audio BDs offer multiple audio tracks for one and the same album) and ID3 tags that the audio player mostly relies on don’t work properly with mka files either. That’s what I’ve experienced, but maybe someone has good ideas how to circumvent these shortcomings?

Stopping mka playback led to Kodi crashing entirely every now and then as well.

1 Like
6

I don’t have crashes when stopping mka files. For mka, as I wrote, you need to use single file with associated cue file, with no chapters embedded in mka. That way you can have correct tags.

I have no interest in multiple audio tracks inside mka, so I have never tested. I create stereo and multichannel albums.

7

It means there are outstanding issues however. The format is not properly supported - chapters in the mka file as well as multiple tracks are nothing extraordinary for mka files.

Good that it can be circumvented somewhat by putting only one track in a mka file and outsourcing tags as well as chapters to a cue file. It’s not there yet though when it comes to ‘throw anything at Kodi and it can handle it’ we’re used to and that we appreciate a lot.