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AC3 (DD5.1) – Big Endian or Little Endian for PS3 Playback?
Here’s the (urgent) situation,
I have made a blu-ray which has a DD5.1 (AC3) soundtrack. I burned the disk from DVDA.
This disk plays perfectly from my SONY BSP350 Blu Ray player. This is connected to a Rotel decoder by coaxial digital cable. The decoder dispays DD5.1. All perfect.
So today – I tool the exact same blu-ray disk (A SONY BD-R 25/GB/GO one by the way), to a cinema which we will premier this movie in very soon.
Despite having a SONY 4k projector (sweet), they play blu rays from a PS3!
Anyhow, the sound all came out mixed down to PCM Stereo.
So we systematically tried to find out what was wrong. There are 4 things at play here, by disk, the PS3, a Dolby DMA8Plus switch and their Dolby decoder. The switch showed PCM stereo whilst playing my disk, but DD5.1 when playing the commercial blu-ray.
Remember – my disk works fine on my system at home. So there must be some problem in terms of the compatibility of the codec I used in vegas (and it’s settings) and the PS3. And this comptibility issue does not exist between the disk and my home player.
Looking through the AC3Pro codec settings in Vegas, there is only one thing that looks like a likely suspect. The checkbox for ‘Save data in Intel byte order (LSB). By default this is unchecked which, after bit of reading, I realise means that the data is in the Motorola format – which is slightly faster to render.
So – will the PS3 only handle AC3 data in Intel Byte order? Could this be the issue?
It’s not easy to get in the cinema to retest on their gear, else I’d just render with this checkbox checked and try it again.
Please help – this is pretty urgent.
Fred
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5 Replies
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Oh, by the way – forgot to mention… …at the cinema they connect the PS3’s audio using an optical cable, but this ought to be irrelevant. (It’s not through the HDMI though – in case that’s significant).
Another suspect I though of might be the LFE channel’s cross-over frequency. I think I remember reading somewhere that some decoders (and maybe players) were fussy about this. But in any case, I left that at it’s default value in vegas when rendering the AC3 file.
Fred
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Is it possible the PS3 at the theater has an older Firmware? If so, and if they can’t connect it to the internet to update, you can offer to bring in the latest firmware on a usb drive. Alternatively you could offer to bring in your ps3 for that one showing.
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Indeed. I’d thought of the ‘taking my blu ray player’ back-up plan.
Should I admit on a SONY forum that I don’t have a PS3? Or worse; that I have an XBOX! 😀
The more research I’ve done, the less I think it’s anything to do with my disk or the codec etc. Especially as I’ve found that the PS3 has the chips that arrange their bytes the Motorola way!
I’ve read up on the various settings of the PS3 and I think I know what the problem might be. I’ll report back if I’m right, or, when the answer gets determined.
Thanks for the firmware idea – it may still prove to be the right answer.
Fred
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I was right.
So – reading up on the PS3 settings, whilst the cinema had set everything up correctly in the ‘Audio Output Settings’ menus correctly, they (and I) did not realise there are more Audio settings under the ‘Video Settings’ menu. (Not really surprising though because it’s a silly place to have them).
So anyway, under ‘Video Settings’ There is ‘BD Audio Output Format (Optical Digital)’. This should have been set to ‘Bitstream (Direct)’ but was, instead, set to a PCM setting. This meant that the PS3 was doing the decoding job, but because optical digital can only send 2 decoded channels that’s why all we got was Stereo.
Solved.
Hope this helps someone else one day.
Fred
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That’s interesting to know. I’ve never touched that setting because everyone I know uses optical digital to output. Glad you found it!
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