Volume of Sound fluctuating after upgrade to v1.10.1

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bvrulez
Posts: 37
Joined: Sun Oct 18, 2015 10:32 am

Volume of Sound fluctuating after upgrade to v1.10.1

Post by bvrulez »

I ripped two DVDs of one Series (Story of Film, a documentary) with two different Versions of MakeMKV (libmakemkv).

The second DVD is now playing over my Samsung TV with a strange sound problem: The center sound, the speaker of the documentary is constantly changing its volume. I dont experience this when playing from a PC. the first DVD is ok.

I checked the preferences of the ripped files with "mplayer -vo null -ao null -frames 0 -identify StoryOfFilmD1_t00.mkv".

The only difference I can see is the version of the encoder: v1.9.7 and v1.10.1. The newer one produces the sound issue.

Does anyone experience this?

Best regards,
Ben
Woodstock
Posts: 9912
Joined: Sun Jul 24, 2011 11:21 pm

Re: Volume of Sound fluctuating after upgrade to v1.10.1

Post by Woodstock »

In your ripping profile, are you passing the audio through ("copy") or re-encoding to FLAC?
Last edited by Woodstock on Sun Mar 19, 2017 9:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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NullNix
Posts: 25
Joined: Sat Jan 31, 2015 12:57 pm

Re: Volume of Sound fluctuating after upgrade to v1.10.1

Post by NullNix »

bvrulez wrote:I ripped two DVDs of one Series (Story of Film, a documentary) with two different Versions of MakeMKV (libmakemkv).

The second DVD is now playing over my Samsung TV with a strange sound problem: The center sound, the speaker of the documentary is constantly changing its volume. I dont experience this when playing from a PC. the first DVD is ok.

I checked the preferences of the ripped files with "mplayer -vo null -ao null -frames 0 -identify StoryOfFilmD1_t00.mkv".

The only difference I can see is the version of the encoder: v1.9.7 and v1.10.1. The newer one produces the sound issue.

Does anyone experience this?

Best regards,
Ben
I suspect this is your TV, not MakeMKV, particularly if the DVD is in stereo rather than 5.1. Setups with centre speakers have to analyze the sound stream of stereo signals in realtime to determine what to move onto the centre channel: usually, they do this by moving frequency bands corresponding to human speech onto the centre channel, if such bands exist and are more-or-less separable from surrounding sound. This can be fooled by things similar to human speech such that the sound is constantly being moved onto the centre channel and then back off it again, often many times a second, which sounds pretty much like a fluctuation in volume, particularly if all the speakers are close together (as they would be on a TV). The only cure for this is to stop using the centre channel for that documentary (or put up with it).

(I saw this with the episode of Attenborough's _The Life of Birds_ about birdsong, which confused my Yamaha receiver into shifting the sound when Attenborough was talking over birdsong onto the centre speaker and off three or four times a second.)

If you find that turning off the centre speaker fixes it, that's the problem.
bvrulez
Posts: 37
Joined: Sun Oct 18, 2015 10:32 am

Re: Volume of Sound fluctuating after upgrade to v1.10.1

Post by bvrulez »

Thank you for your answers and sorry for my late reply. I don't think I do something like processing to FLAC. I use normal settings and my only advanced settings are regarding the automatic selection of language and subtitles. Also, the second opinion might not be my problem, because the sound is bad both over my 5.1 Marantz Receiver and over the just-stereo TV. As the TV has no center this should not be the problem then, right? I have to say that the Marantz receives its sound from the TV, and the TV is an older Samsung with a program called "SmartTV" where I can directly access the folders on my NAS. This is the first time these problems occur and it might be possible that it is related to the TV, especially since it is the only documentary that I ripped using makeMKV so far. I have to investigate more but just wanted to reply quickly as I found these answers now.
bvrulez
Posts: 37
Joined: Sun Oct 18, 2015 10:32 am

Re: Volume of Sound fluctuating after upgrade to v1.10.1

Post by bvrulez »

I am comming back to this topic because I encountered problems again. I am watching the series NYPD blue. The first series I ripped February 2016 with

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libmakemkv v1.9.9 (1.3.3/1.4.4) x86_64-linux-gnu
The second series I ripped November 2016 with

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libmakemkv v1.10.2 (1.3.3/1.4.4) x86_64-linux-gnu
I checked both files with ffprobe and the audios are both

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Stream #0:1(eng): Audio: ac3, 48000 Hz, 4.0, fltp, 448 kb/s (default)
I am watching this over a Samsung TV which is connected to my Open-Media-Vault server NAS. The streaming application is the plugin "mini DLNA". Then there is a Marantz 5.1 Receiver which gets the signal from the TV-out.

The first season is fine in 5.1

The second season I cannot watch in 5.1 because all background noises are too loud and the center voices lack high frequencies. So, I watch it just over the TV in stereo.

This is an different problem than the previously encountered sound issue with the constant back and forth panning.

But, what strikes me is that I have absolutely no problem with any DVD I ripped with v1.9 and I do have several problems with v1.10. I am no expert but I really suspect that there might be a problem here.

Another option would be that my Samsung TVs Smart Hub (the application that connects to all DLNA servers) was updated since then several times.

However, I have the feeling that this is related to the update of the makeMKV library.

EDIT: I don't convert to flac, I just pass through and it is all AC3, also the ones that make no problem.
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