HDDVD Rip DD+ Compatibility Issues

[Krobar]

Has anyone else experienced issues with DD+ bit-streaming of HDDVD MKVs with DD+ having problems? A Denon and a Marantz I tried will play them but three other brands wont. All of the receivers play DD+ ripped from Bluray correctly and can also play Stereo DD+ tacks from HDDVD but 5.1 DD+ tracks from HDDVD wont play.

[Krobar]

It seems the issue with the HDDVD files produced by MakeMKV is they are using an unusually high audio frame rate. At this point I don't know if this is outside of Dolby spec or not. One Receiver I tried could play the 62.5FPS stream but not the 187.5FPS stream.

Here are my results:
HDDVD:
Liar Liar - 5.1 - 1536Kbit - 187.5FPS (256 SPF) - Fails
Liar Liar - 2.0 - 192Kbit - 31.25FPS (1536 SPF) - OK
Lethal Weapon 2 - 5.1 - 640Kbit - 62.5 FPS (768 SPF) - Fails
Led Zeppelin - Song Remains The Same - 192Kbit- 2.0 - 31.25FPS (1536 SPF) - OK
Yes- Live At Montreux - 5.1 - 768Kbit - 62.5 FPS (768 SPF) - Fails

Bluray:
Inside Out (French) - 7.1 - 896Kbit - 31.25FPS (1536 SPF) - OK
Secret Life Of Pets (Spanish) - 7.1 - 768Kbit - 31.25FPS (1536 SPF) - OK
BlacKkKlansman (French) - 7.1 - 768Kbit - 31.25FPS (1536 SPF) - OK
Finding Dory (French) - 7.1 - 896Kbit - 31.25FPS (1536 SPF) - OK
Dolby Safari Demo - 7.1 - 1664Kbit - 31.25FPS (1536 SPF) - OK
Dolby Leaf Demo - 5.1 + Atmos - 448Kbit - 31.25FPS (1536 SPF) - OK

[Krobar]

"A DD+ stream is a collection of fixed-length syncframe packets, each of which corresponds to either 256, 512, 768, or 1536 consecutive time-domain audio samples. (The 1536-sample case is the most common case, and corresponds to Dolby Digital; the shorter subframe lengths are intended for use in interactive applications like video games where reducing encoder latency is an important concern)."

It seems 1536 is always used by Bluray but HDDVD varies. In short MakeMKV is correct and I think Kodi is probably handling it OK too. If you are suffering problems playing back HDDVD 5.1 DD+ tracks in bitstream shout at your AVR manufacturer as they are not fully supporting the DD+ standard.

[paulster]

I haven't had to deal with this in forever as I ended up converting my DD+ tracks on HD-DVD to FLAC for compatibility purposes because of this exact same issue, but I do remember it was one studio in particular whose discs all had the same issue on a bunch of AVRs.

[Krobar]

The issue is a Kodi bug. Universal HDDVDs use DD+ at 256 samples per frame, normal DD+ is 1536 SPF. The player / player software must combine smaller audio frames like this into one larger frame to send over HDMI. Kodi correctly creates the larger frame but then sends duff audio frames so for a 256SPF file the stream looks like this:
Good full size audio frame
Faulty empty audio frame
Faulty empty audio frame
Faulty empty audio frame
Faulty empty audio frame
Faulty empty audio frame
Good full size audio frame

If anyone else is interested in getting this fixed please post here:
https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/issues/17427

Another option to fix this is to convert to a different audio format or even better it might be possible to adjust the DD+ stream in the MKV file (Although I dont know of any software that can do this)