Roku Developer Program

[srankin]

So Amazon has certain titles with 5.1 channel audio. But the SDK documentation of compatible file formats are all stereo.

Has anyone experimented successfully or unsuccessfully with 5.1 encoded audio?

thanks

[RokuKevin]

It's currently unsupported, because we don't have a whole lot of experience with encodings of 5.1 audio.

However, it should work in most cases and we are very interested in following the this thread about your experiences with 5.1 audio encoding.

One thing to be aware of when testing this out, is that there can be only one audio stream in encodings the Roku box recognizes. Please see this earlier post about removing extra audio streams without re-encoding your content:
http://forums.roku.com/viewtopic.php?t=25489

--Kevin

[srankin]

I converted an Xvid with AC3 5.1 Dolby Digital audio using Handbrake's AC3 Passthru audio option and it played fine on the Roku and sounded great.

I am working on converting it directly from the Video_TS folder, although I can't see why this wouldn't work as well.

[srankin]

"srankin" wrote:
I converted an Xvid with AC3 5.1 Dolby Digital audio using Handbrake's AC3 Passthru audio option and it played fine on the Roku and sounded great.

I am working on converting it directly from the Video_TS folder, although I can't see why this wouldn't work as well.

Unfortunately, when encoding directly from .vob files (or dvd or iso image) the rebufferring problems are present.

Weirdly enough, converting an xvid with AC3 passthru works fine.

One more odd detail: I have the roku set up with analog (stereo) outputs to my tv and digital optical to my stereo. When playing a converted DVD, the audio routes to both . . . and eventually the file starts rebufferring. When playing a converted xvid, the audio only routes to the digital optical.

I don't know what to make of this, but thought I'd report it.

I was wrong above. Rebuffering still happens, just later in the movie (~100minutes in vs. 60 minutes in). It has been stated on the forums here that using the -r option in handbrake to force a static frame rate fixes the rebufferring. I will try this.