Thoughts and Ramblings

General things I find of interest.

Where's real AC3 Passthrough on the Mac?

In my previous post, I discussed how to do AC3 passthrough using Perian. Unfortunately, this method is really a hack, and doesn’t work in all situations. There is a better solution though.

Apple has enabled AC3 passthrough with Quicktime. They have enabled it on the AppleTV to support playback of their HD movies. The code for passthrough is even in the latest version of Quicktime on the desktop, but the celebration ends there. Apple has not exposed a method for enabling passthrough on the desktop either through the user interface, or a hidden preference. They have not even exposed a method for developers to use it through Quicktime (I’ve tried).

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Friday, March 14, 2008

The Correct Way to Enable AC3 Passthrough with Quicktime

I have seen a few people post methods about enabling AC3 passthrough, and many of them are overly complicated or in some cases even wrong. This also serves as the first place to describe how to enable DTS passthrough. Since I designed the code that actually does this, I’ll list the steps here:
Note: This does not work with all receivers. If these instructions fail for you, most likely your receiver will not work with this. Passthrough is still a hack, and thus this hack is still outside of the specs.
Note 2: Apple broke AC3 rather seriously in QT 7.3 (bug id 5594478, go tell them to fix it). If have a .mov file, open it, and it says that it is stereo audio rather than 5.1, this is a symptom of that bug. You will need to have at least Perian 1.1 and re-open the original file that made the .mov file. This bug has been fixed in 7.4.5, but any .mov files created with QT 7.3 or 7.4 are still affected by this bug.
Note 3: Perian 1.1.4 contains a bug in which DTS passthrough fails to work. This will be fixed in the next version. This has been fixed in Perian 1.2, released Dec 17, 2009.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Saturday, February 9, 2008

Followup to Open Source Attitudes

Over half a year ago (that’s way to long to get back to this), I posted an blog entry on what I have observed in open source attitudes. I received a number of comments, the most interesting which is Daniel’s. What I found the most fascinating was the two opposite views I got in the comments.

First, there were the developers, who seemed to largely agree with my comments. Then there were the users, who took offense at some of my comments, or the way that open source developers have treated them in the past.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Saturday, February 9, 2008

Perian 1.1 Released

For those who don’t know yet, Perian version 1.1 has been released. This one was a long time coming, including large sections of code which were written for 1.1 before 1.0 was even released.

Now it is time to sit back, relax, and get some sleep before the bug reports start piling in.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Thursday, February 7, 2008

Sourceforge SPAM

Yes, sourceforge.net has resorted to spamming its users. I have received a number of emails from this “Sourceforge.net Marketplace”. In the past, I just let the spam catcher correctly junk them, but today I got annoyed with it. I looked at the bottom of the email, and I see

This email was sent to: xxxx@users.sourceforge.net if you would prefer not to receive information about SourceForge.net Marketplace, please update your communication preferences by visiting the Profile Center.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Friday, February 1, 2008

Engineer @ Plex, Open Source Developer, and Science/Technology Enthusiast.

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