Dvbviewer Bester Codec
Even under perfect reception conditions the DVBViewer may not show the desired results. This is mostly due to the fact that important components for audio and video playback are missing. Also other programs can interfere with the DVBViewer because they altered some registry-settings or installed certain DirectShow-components with a higher merit (a description follows down below). You should study this chapter quite thoroughly in case of having problems. But you might consider the information provided useful, if you're just interested.
What Are DirectShow Filters?With DirectShow (part of DirectX) Microsoft introduced a very flexible multimedia interface, which is used by almost every modern media player under windows. DirectShow components are often named as filters (although it doesn't apply in each case) and are registered in the system and are so accessible by other programs. In most cases their file-type is.ax, but sometimes also.dll.Processing audio and video data streams a long chain of such filters can be involved - each one is responsible for a certain function. The DVBViewer and media-players in general only manage those filters or decoders. They are only indirectly concerned with the processing of the data streams.A compilation of the necessary filters is sent to the DirectShow filter-manager.
If you want to play a video-file for example the manager is told to trace the necessary filters for creating the filter graph. Sometimes the automatic building process leads to unwanted results; therefore certain DirectShow based programs can manually adjust the building process, for example determining the use of a certain filter. Usually the manager uses the “best” filter available. “Best” is not to be understood as quality. “Best” is determined by the merit value of a filter.
The filter with the highest merit will always be used. The merit value is set by the filter's author. Therefore the results may not be optimal. Fortunately you can modify the merit value.Which Filters Are Involved?The first or main filter is the source-filter, which provides the data stream received via satellite (consisting of audio, video and if necessary also teletext and EPG).The DVBViewer features a proprietary source-filter:.
DVBViewer filter (DVBSource): This filter sports an integrated demultiplexer and is used for both live-tv and media playback, there are none of the weaknesses of the Microsoft demultiplexer. A demultiplexer separates the audio and video streams and is responsible for fast seeking in a file, in short it is a parser.It can also be used for playback of separate.mp2 and.ac3 files.The next filters in the chain are responsible for decompressing the audio and video data. These filters are the d ecoders.
The decoding is the most difficult and time-consuming step in the whole process. The playback quality depends highly on the decoders.With the installation of the TechniSat software a suitable video decoder, the Mediamatics/DVDExpress decoder (until driver release 4.2.10) or the Sonic decoder (since driver release 4.3.0), is installed automatically.
In case of problems with audio playback you should install the free Moonlight/Elecard Odio Dekoda.Reminder: The selected filters have to be installed since the DVBViewer does not bring its own filters.The end of the chain are the audio- and video-renderers, which send the data via drivers to the graphic- and sound-card. The video renderer can be chosen at Options/Enhanced/Render Output. You'll find a description in in chapter 7. You can also set different audio-renderers, but those are only different interfaces to the sound-card (see Settings/Options/DirectShow/Dedynamic Filter).AC3 / Dolby digitalFor AC3 you need to use either Marfi's filter (SkyAVC.ax) or the DVBViewer filter (DVBSource.ax) as source-filter.
In the channel list you must input the AC3 PID as audio PID and enable the AC3 checkbox. You will also need a suitable AC3 audio decoder. It is recommended to use the Moonlight Odio Dekoda or the AC3 filter of Vigovsky Alexander.The following steps must be executed:. Download and install the Odio Dekoda from or the AC3-Filter 0.70b or newer from. Select SPDIF in AC3-filter. You must use either the DVBViewer source-filter or Marfi's source-filter. Go to Settings/Options/Enhanced and select the appropriate source-filter.
In the channel list edit the channel, e. Pro7 (on Astra 19.2 there are only Pro7, Sat1 and ZDF broadcasting in AC3 (2/0 and 3/2)).
Enter '257' for Pro7, 1795 for Sat1 and 125 for ZDF as audio PID and check the AC3 box. Tune the Channel and enjoy Dolby Digital.Experiments With GraphEdit©Before you do any changes to the filter graph you should inform yourself about the filters actually being in use.
The first place to look is within the DVBViewer at View/Filters - all used filters are listed there. Unfortunately some of them are not labeled with a meaningful name. Left-clicking one of them opens its property page if available.For a comprehensive overview of all registered filters in the system you should try GraphEdit from Microsoft. Since it is part of the DirectX SDK, which is a very large file, it is better to search for a download site providing a stand-alone version; you may try (rar-compressed) or.GraphEdit shows a filter graph as a diagram and provides an easy way to build an own graph.
Here is an overview of the features offered by GraphEdit:. After selecting Graph/Insert filters a hierarchically arranged list with all available filters appears. In the Directshow Filters section you will find - among others - the available MPEG decoders listed with filename and path; this information is needed in order to un-register filters that cause problems (more about it later). Look for names such as ATI, Cyberlink, DVD Express, Elecard, MainConcept, InterVideo, Ligos, nVidia, Sonic, Ulead. File/Render Media File lets GraphEdit respectively the filter manager automatically build the graph that is necessary for playing a file. As file you may select any media file. The individual filters are connected like the components of an audio system by their output and input pins.
The automatic media file rendering shows, what is used as standard in the system. Clicking on the Play button lets GraphEdit respectively the filter chain play the file.File/Connect to Remote Graph connects to the running graph of the DVBViewer and displays it.By selecting File/Render URL you may let GraphEdit build a filter graph for TV reception via the SkyStar2 card and to function as a TV set!
Proceed as follows:. Launch DVBViewer and tune the desired channel. Open the channel-list, go to the Edit tabsheet and note the Video- and AudioPID displayed there. Terminate DVBViewer, launch GraphEdit and select File/Render URL. Input the following address: b2c2src://VideoPid-AudioPID.mpg (VideoPID and AudioPID stand for the values you have noted).
Now a corresponding graph will be build and can be used for playback. Graph/Insert Filter lets you insert other filters into the graph. After disconnecting the filters with Edit / Disconnect all, you may re-connect the filters manually pin by pin and build in a different decoder, for example - just drag the mouse pointer from an output pin to the desired input pin. In this way you can find out, how different components affect the playback.Unfortunately some filters are indicated in GraphEdit by meaningless numbers. In this case it helps to store the entire graph via File/Save as XML and to open the file, which contains additional information, with a text editor. For further details please refer to the GraphEdit help file.Interventions in the SystemIf the adjustments offered by the DVBViewer are not sufficient to achieve playback with a desired filter combination, only tweaking the system registry helps. Please note: Never ever simply just remove unwanted filters, since they are registered in the system.
The according entries can be found in the Windows registry under HKEYCLASSESROOT. Changes in the registry should only be applied, however, if you know exactly what you do.
Otherwise you could permanently compromise your system. There are better and much simpler ways to disable unwanted filters.If you do not want to remove a filter completely, but achieve that the filter manager does not prefer it, you have to lower its Merit value. This value is located in the registry, but usually encoded and hard to find. Therefore Radlight® provided a small tool, the Radlight® Filter Manager. You can download it in the members' area at.The register/unregister buttons speak for themselves.Copy CLSID copies the value into the Windows clipboard so that you can insert it into the corresponding box in the DVBViewer's directshow options.Navigate jumps to or rather shows you the files belonging to the selected entry, for the Cyberlink Video/SP Decoder those are CLLine21.ax and CLVSD.ax for example.The dropdown box lets you set predefined standard values for the merit.The box below the Set Value button allows to enter individual values for the merit (just type in and press Set Value). Have a look at the About tab for further information.Please note: For modifications to take effect, you first have to leave the user account and log in again (under Windows 2000/XP), or to restart the computer (?, Windows 98).
I haven't yet started ripping any CDs but I did open the app for a quick look at it. It's the first such applicationthat I've used.Firstly, I see that the FLAC encoding has 'Lossless 5' as the default.Since FLAC is meant to be lossless, I'm not sure why there are degrees of 'lossless' in this case.Just looking for advice on what particular setting I should set my rips for. Yes, I want lossless rips, but if two settingshave the same audio quality but one setting uses a lot more of my hard drive space, well, you'd want to go with thesetting that uses the less space for the sound quality, right?Also, I see under 'Options' at the top of the dialogue box concerning 'Ripping method'. Again, which is the best optionto choose and why that over other choices?
It's not degrees of lossless, it's degrees of compression. All FLAC files contain identical audio data, but if you apply higher compression, the encoder will take more processing time to produce slightly smaller files. The default '5' setting is just a trade-off between compression and encoding speed.changing it might change the file size a little, if that matters to you, but it doesn't change the quality of the rip at all.If space is a serious consideration for you, I'd recommend you rip one of your CDs at the default, check the file sizes, then rip again at higher compression and decide whether the space savings are worth the longer ripping time.The best ripping method in most cases is 'Secure,' as it recovers errors and ensures accurate rips on most commercial CDs.
'Burst' is faster, but doesn't have error recovery, while 'Defective by Design' is mostly for non-standard or problem CDs that can't seem to rip successfully with secure ripping. You can read more about the specific settings for Secure ripping. Respectfully, 'people claim' is the key phrase here. And is quite different from 'people document with rigorous testing'. There is a lot of FUD in the audiophile world. I suppose at least using uncompressed FLAC is better than WAV and satisfies the phobia that some have regarding even lossless compression.Seriously! It's amazing the stuff people are willing to believe.
(There are people who think the coating on the metal prongs on the power cord on their amplifier impacts the 'spatial dimensions' of the music they hear.) It's very telling that you virtually never see true double blind testing of these things that people claim they hear.The notion that a player works harder because a decoder decompresses data before feeding it into a DAC.at the exact same data rate, mind you, regardless of compression.is somewhat akin to expecting a document that was opened from a zip file to be a little bit blurrier than one that came straight from the word processor. It's not degrees of lossless, it's degrees of compression. All FLAC files contain identical audio data, but if you apply higher compression, the encoderwill take more processing time to produce slightly smaller files. The default '5' setting is just a trade-off between compression and encoding speed.changing it might changethe file size a little, if that matters to you, but it doesn't change the quality of the rip at all.If space is a serious consideration for you, I'd recommend you rip one of your CDs at the default, check the file sizes, then rip again at higher compression and decide whetherthe space savings are worth the longer ripping time.The best ripping method in most cases is 'Secure,' as it recovers errors and ensures accurate rips on most commercial CDs. 'Burst' is faster, but doesn't have error recovery,while 'Defective by Design' is mostly for non-standard or problem CDs that can't seem to rip successfully with secure ripping. You can read more about the specific settings forSecure ripping.Thanks for that. I've set my option to 'Secure' as per your advice.
All the options in 'Accurate-rip' are ticked by default, it seems. Any other settings in there which I shouldhave as default? Re 'Defective by design' setting.what do you mean by 'non-standard' CDs? By 'problem CDs' I assume you mean audio CDs which may be in less than pristinecondition and so are buggy in some way, play-wise?That leaves me with what option to go for in the Encoding section. Ok, so ALL options are lossless.
Are there practical reasons to choose one option over another, apart from storagespace? Would an uncompressed library pose difficulties for lower specced computers or something? If not, what exactly is the problem (if there is one?). If you want to imagine thatyou're going to be an audiophile ripper, what setting would you choose?
What would be the difference between the default setting's ripping time vs uncompressed? Is there a consensuson what the default should be? I very much enjoy reading the testing done by archimago, a forum member at the squeezebox forums (among others).
He does very nice work.One has to click on the years/months to see all the various extensive testing he's done on almost all things digital.I glanced at your link, it seems similar to something that I found a year or two (or three back) which may also interest you:Some interesting comments from that include:'there is no point to distributing music in 24-bit/192kHz format. Its playback fidelity is slightly inferior to 16/44.1 or 16/48, and it takes up 6 times the space'.The author also points out that such high performance settings are really only relevant at the engineering stage of the recording but can be dumped when thefinal mix is in.I have read some hifi magazines where you get people writing letters and saying that they are scientists and that such and such improves the sound quality ofplayback. Usually the response is that that there is no science to back up the claim but the counter is that maybe we just haven't devised a suitable test tomeasure these perceived differences in quality. For playback from a 'fixed' system, where storage shouldn't be a problem (as opposed to a phone or portable device) I'd want a lossless compression, the playback audio will be as good as the original source file. I'd stay away from.WAV or AIFF as neither are standardized for metadata, and you will discover sooner or later that the metadata is as important, maybe more important than the audio quality.I personally use FLAC, if I was an Apple devotee, ALAC might be a better choice. Both are lossless. You do need to see what your playback device (renderer) will work with.
WMA won't play FLAC without a third party codec, obtaining that can be problematical now, as most of the codec sites seem to package them with malware, or at least spyware. There are other issues with WMA also. Itunes also has its issues, and the default settings can make a mess of your file system and tags. There are several decent versions of playback software/renderers/controllers out there, including Foobar 2000, Media Monkey, Kinsky and even VLC Media Player. What is your playback system?You also have to think about how you want to organize the music files and folders, a separate issue from tagging them.
Getting that set up the way you want particularly for compilations, multi-disc sets and Classical collections can take some trial and error. Depending on your storage system, you may have issues with file names that are too long for your software/operating system. I'd rip a number of albums you listen to often, then stop and use them, before doing hundreds or thousands of CD's and then doing it a second time because of organizational problems. Been there, done that.There are a lot of issues in doing this, I've been at it several years and am still discovering things. In the end, it should give you a very high quality and flexible playback system.For portable devices with limited storage, you will have to use lossy compression, unless you have a very small library.
How lossy depends on a tradeoff between how much audio you want to store and how lossy it gets before you find ilistening objectionable. Some of the newer codecs such as m4a (AAC) can compress to smaller file sizes with less noticeable artifacts than older codecs like mp3.
I have two sets of files of my rips, FLAC for home and moderately high quality m4a for my portable devices. Can I hear the difference, usually no, but sometimes very much.Defective by design is an attempt at allowing rips of some copy protected or other non-standard discs, not damaged discs. As you may know, burst ripping just encodes whatever it rips from the disc with no error checking/correction above that which the drive does by itself. If you can't get a rip at all using secure rip, try burst and listen to the result. If you are lucky, the errors won't be audible. Otherwise, get another copy of the CD.
You can try Defective By Design, particularly if the CD plays OK in a portable player but not in a computer, but I've only run into a couple that played with that setting out of a couple thousand CD's I've ripped.I have my secure ripping set with Enable Ultra Secure Ripping, minimum passes 1, maximum passes 4, end after 2 clean passes, vary drive speed checked. I have maximum re-reads as 100 which is probably high. If set too high, you may get random 'good' reads which really aren't, I've seen that happen fairly often.
I'm suspicious of anything that requires re-rips, even if the result is 'secure' I try cleaning the CD and ripping again, often with a different make CD drive, if still bad, I listen to the recovered audio to see if it sounds OK to me. It usually sounds OK.This may take a while to digest, dBPoweramp is very powerful software, IMO, the best available, but there is a steep learning curve because there are so many issues involved. Stick with it, it will all be worthwhile in the end. Thanks for that.
Dvbviewer Download
I've set my option to 'Secure' as per your advice. All the options in 'Accurate-rip' are ticked by default, it seems.
Any other settings in there which I should have as default? Re 'Defective by design' setting.what do you mean by 'non-standard' CDs? By 'problem CDs' I assume you mean audio CDs which may be in less than pristinecondition and so are buggy in some way, play-wise?Defective by design is one of those things you only monkey with when nothing else works. It may become necessary for messed up CDs, ones with troublesome copy-protection, things like that. That leaves me with what option to go for in the Encoding section. Ok, so ALL options are lossless. Are there practical reasons to choose one option over another, apart from storagespace?
Would an uncompressed library pose difficulties for lower specced computers or something? If not, what exactly is the problem (if there is one?). If you want to imagine thatyou're going to be an audiophile ripper, what setting would you choose? What would be the difference between the default setting's ripping time vs uncompressed?
Is there a consensuson what the default should be? What is it?The only considerations when choosing a lossless compression level are (1) processing time, and (2) file size. There is no 'audio' or 'audiophile' consideration, as we are talking about the exact same, perfectly identical audio data.
Here's an analogy, with something that may be more familiar: I don't know if you ever use file compression programs to archive stuff on your computer.I have and use both 7zip and WinRar. So let's say I want to archive of all my AmEx statements from last year. I select all twelve.pdfs, then I use one of those programs to put them into a compressed package (that I'll file away on some backup drive somewhere and never look at again! ) These programs have settings that allow me to prioritize/balance between speed and file size.on the one end, the slowest setting makes the most compact file but it takes noticeably longer to do it, and at the other end, the fastest setting is very speedy, but the file it creates is definitely larger. But the point is, if I ever need to open up the.zip or.rar package and access those files, the.pdfs are identical to the originals. They're not less clear, less sharp, less complete, they didn't drop a word here and there. They are the exact same files as the original.pdfs, irrespective of which speed vs file size settings I used when I archived them.This is the nature of lossless compression, for both data files and music files.
Nothing is lost in compression. Any player that plays.flac has an decoder that knows how to open the.flac file and feed the audio bitstream into its digital-to-audio converter for playback. The package it arrived in is irrelevant.
(This is also why all lossless codecs have the same audio quality.once the package is opened, the audio bits fed into the DAC are indistinguishable from the original CD.)I don't have to imagine.I do consider myself an 'audiophile ripper', and I just leave it on the default. I'd only consider changing the compression setting if I were really squeezed for storage space or if I had a huge number of disks to rip. I'm well past that now, and seldom have more than a handful of disks to rip in any one sitting. And I have abundant storage space. So lossless compression levels just aren't on my radar as something to worry about when ripping music.Even then, faster ripping wouldn't speed up the process, as metadata processing is usually the bottleneck. I don't have to imagine.I do consider myself an 'audiophile ripper', and I just leave it on the default.A lot schmidj's discussion didn't take into account that I did say that I wanted to have lossless audio.
Maybe I should have said that I want to rip to a PC where I haveplenty of space (at the moment).i.e. At the moment I'm not looking for portability of my rips.I did click another hyperlink in the menu which brought up the stuff that schmidj mentions, re 'ultra secure' rips as well as maximum number of re-reads. Ultra secure isn'tticked by default and the re-reads is set to x34 by default. Any consensus on settings here?e.g. We're happy with the 'Lossless level 5 (default)'?
As I said, I have no issue with storage space on my PC.Good to tick the 'ultra secure' option?Default maximum number of re-reads adequate?Sort of related, on AccurateRip section, mine states that it's 'unconfigured (waiting for key disc to find offset)'. What's that all about.I do see more hyperlinks in the menu.truck loads.default okay?Almost lastly, I was asking about lossless etc not so much because of space considerations but more because I was wondering if any of these default settings orchanges to them might make the PC work harder to play them. Not sure if that is a real issue or not.Lastly, I did post a reply to the guy with the link above, yesterday. My reply isn't up yet. I also posted a link. Is that post getting up? Nothing suss about it.