Ripping Dolby Atmos into MKV

[daried]

Have been trying to figure out audio drops in Hellboy UHD with TruHD Atmos track. Recently had them in Apocalypse Now as well. This thread seems to describe what I've been experiencing. I checked the discs for both those movies , and they have multiple segments. Ready Player one is a movie that doesn't show the same behavior, and check it, it is a single segment.

Sharing info in hope that this can be resolved in a future release.
Thanks!

[karbre]

Yes it should definitely be worked on in future updates. For the time being, you can try demuxing the audio of problematic titles with DGDemux and mux it back into the MakeMKV result file via MKVToolNix. Sometimes that produces better results for seamless branching discs.

[ApexAftermath]

Okay so what is exactly the fix for this??? I have seen it on return of the king with the two parts joined and it desyncs at the disc change but not on fellowship or two towers. I have been having a horrible time with this issue on the new fast 9 disc. This is probably the worst I've ever seen this problem happen. Probably because there is a director's cut on this disc. But why doesn't it always happen????

[SamuriHL]

As I mentioned in the f9 thread, it can be complicated. There's a myriad of problems. From how it's ripped and stored in the mkv container to how players read and bitstream it from the mkv, there's no one single issue. Makemkv put in a lot of fixes to get around this problem but with seamless branching titles some issues remain. The thing is if the players are updated they can become more robust in playing these but if you read through this thread you will see its not as simple and straight forward as it may seem to update the player code. Add to the mix keeping the Dolby vision layer in the mkv and things get even more complicated.

My attempt at fixing f9 will go something like this...

I've already created a dovi mkv with makemkv. This one contains audio issues with plex. I will make another mkv, non dovi as it doesn't support doing so yet, with clonebd. I'll check the audio in that one and if it doesn't contain the audio issues in plex, I'm going to attempt to replace the audio in my dovi mkv with the clonebd generated mkv using mkvtoolnix. There is absolutely no guarantee whatsoever that this will work. The odds are not in my favor. But it's worth a shot since the only thing wasted in trying is time. If I get time to do this today I'll report back how it goes. I'm not super hopeful here but that's what I plan on trying.

Sent from my SM-G998U1 using Tapatalk

[jayper]

As I mentioned in the f9 thread, it can be complicated. There's a myriad of problems. From how it's ripped and stored in the mkv container to how players read and bitstream it from the mkv, there's no one single issue. Makemkv put in a lot of fixes to get around this problem but with seamless branching titles some issues remain. The thing is if the players are updated they can become more robust in playing these but if you read through this thread you will see its not as simple and straight forward as it may seem to update the player code. Add to the mix keeping the Dolby vision layer in the mkv and things get even more complicated.

My attempt at fixing f9 will go something like this...

I've already created a dovi mkv with makemkv. This one contains audio issues with plex. I will make another mkv, non dovi as it doesn't support doing so yet, with clonebd. I'll check the audio in that one and if it doesn't contain the audio issues in plex, I'm going to attempt to replace the audio in my dovi mkv with the clonebd generated mkv using mkvtoolnix. There is absolutely no guarantee whatsoever that this will work. The odds are not in my favor. But it's worth a shot since the only thing wasted in trying is time. If I get time to do this today I'll report back how it goes. I'm not super hopeful here but that's what I plan on trying.

Sent from my SM-G998U1 using Tapatalk

Interested to see how this goes! Thanks for testing. On top of the issues I ran into with Fast 9, I also hit similar issues last night with Star Trek II - Wrath of Khan (Extended Cut), which is another DoVi disc. Playback issues were only present while using Plex, Kodi was fine.

[SamuriHL]

EDIT: NOPE....just let it play straight through that scene at the airport and it annihilates audio sync. So this method does *NOT* work. I will leave it here for posterity in case anyone wants to play, but, again, DOES NOT fix the issue.

EDIT2: Just tested the original CloneBD made MKV and it, too has the same exact audio drop problem with sync. I'm really wondering if this is more of a Plex issue than a problem with the MKV.


I don't recall having any issues with Wrath of Khan. Interesting.

Ok, so my process seems to have HELPED but did NOT fix the audio drop at your airport scene. BUT, it did fix the audio sync issue after the drop. Of course, this is just spot checking so I can't say for certain whether we'd have sync issues when watching it full through. The drop issue is most definitely a Plex bug that they need to deal with.

Process as follows:

Rip the disc to decrypted folder backup with MakeMKV.
Create initial MKV with MakeMKV. I used titleset 801 for the extended version for this session.
Next, create another MKV with CloneBD, also using titleset 801 or what you chose in the last step with MakeMKV if different.
Open up MKVToolNix
Add the MakeMKV created MKV as a source file
Deselect the TrueHD track, leaving all other tracks selected
Add the CloneBD created MKV as a source file
(Pro tip, it will color code the source files and their respective tracks so you can keep track of which tracks are associated with which source file...sweet)
Deselect all tracks except the TrueHD track from the CloneBD sourced MKV

Write out the new MKV. This seems to have improved things but your mileage may vary.

[SamuriHL]

Ok, I've spent more time on this than I really should have but I can definitively tell you this is *NOT* an MKV problem and not an issue with MakeMKV or CloneBD or DVDFab for that matter. I ripped a single m2ts file using DVDFab and stuck that on my NAS for Plex to play with. It's without any doubt a Plex bug cause even with the m2ts, which doesn't exhibit these kinds of stupid problems normally, we get the audio drop/sync issue. So Plex needs to get their stuff together and get this fixed. That's so likely to happen. LOL

[ApexAftermath]

Of course when you search the Plex forums for this issue you see a bunch of topics that are locked because no one replied to them. This kind of problem should be a priority for them but instead they are probably going to make more updates to Plex arcade or some garbage like that.

I'm sure a ton of people have ran into this but the biggest issue is a lot of people don't get technical enough with it to realize what is happening and just probably write it off as a glitch.

But then you get stuff like fast 9 directors cut that has a ton of inserted scenes all over the place and this issue happens all the time. I ended up just switching to the AC3 5.1 track last night because I was having to do the skip backwards fix over and over and over.

[SamuriHL]

Yea I ended up watching the disc on my UB820 the two times I sat and watched it. It would seem for this one Kodi is actually worse. I tried my m2ts file in Kodi figuring that'd be good to go. Uhhhh, no. It actually breaks it to the point where the audio continually drops in and out til you restart it. LOL So yes, this is an issue and no I'm not hopeful that it'll get fixed any time soon. Which sucks badly for me since my HTPC is current dead until I can rebuild it sometime next year. So I'm stuck with streaming devices.

[Poker354]

The problem is not exclusive to Plex. I have a Nvidia Shield Pro 2019 and the issue occurs with Just Player and Vimu as well. It is not a MKV problem though. I made a .ts copy of F9 director cut with TsMuxer nightly to play on the Sony UBP x700 and it works flawlessly through the bluray player but the same .ts file played on Vimu has the same audio drop out and sync issue. Kodi on the shield does not seem to have the issue, but DV on the Developer Builds such a Kodinerds is unwatchable with all the micro stutters.

[pcolmer]

This “FIX” will NOT solve the dropout issue in KODI! KODI’s issue is a hard coded max bitrate value.

Just a FYI

Just FYI ...

Kodi 19 now has a fix written and merged into the codebase: https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/20361 to resolve problems it was having with TrueHD. That should be available in the nightly builds now. Not sure how long it will take for a new "dot" release to be made that incorporates this.

That fix is a backport of https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/20339, and that pull request has a lot of detail of what went into fixing it, for the technically curious.

[SamuriHL]

Awesome. That will be good for sure.

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[jayper]

Thanks for the heads up! Will look for a nightly build. Good news!

[pcolmer]

Kodi 19 now has a fix written and merged into the codebase: https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/20361 to resolve problems it was having with TrueHD. That should be available in the nightly builds now. Not sure how long it will take for a new "dot" release to be made that incorporates this.

And the answer to that question is not long at all ...

https://kodi.tv/article/kodi-matrix-19-3-release/

"There's been a long-standing Atmos audio issue on all platforms that support TrueHD passthrough - we know that this this has been irritating people for some time, and we've now been able to fix this."

[SamuriHL]

Now if only plex could pick up the same fix we'd be in great shape. LOL Has anyone checked this build with F9 to see if it's truly fixed completely?