1 Topic by yesgrey (edited by yesgrey3 2010-07-14 23:48:18)

  • Registered: 2007-05-03
  • Posts: 70

Topic: Use your RME to watch movies with perfect audio pitch

I know that the majority of RME owners use their equipment for professional reasons, but in case you also use it in your free times when watching some movies in your PC this could be a nice feature to use...

There is a free DShow audio renderer called reclock which let us correct the audio pitch of the movies. The big part of the PAL dvds are speedup from 24fps to 25fps, and the audio is too high pitched. The same happens with Blu-rays, which are slowdown to 23.976fps. With Blu-ray, the lower pitch is not very noticeable, but with PAL material it is.
Using reclock, we just need to set our display's refresh rate to a multiple of 24 and it will slow down (PAL movies) and speedup (BR) the movies to match the display's refresh rate. The audio is resampled to keep the sync with video and it ends with the original pitch.
Now there's a little drawback about this... the audio is resampled by reclock. To overcome this, I've made some slightly changes to reclock to allow us, RME's users, to use the capability of setting the soundcard's clock that we want using DDS.
This way, the audio is pitch corrected without any resampling, we just need to set our RME's clock to 46080Hz for PAL material and to 48048Hz for Blu-ray material.
The full instructions are here.
Reclock, can be downloaded here.

I know we can use the microsoft audio renderer to acomplish this, but since it does not bypass kmixer, we will always end with resampled audio. Reclock supports Kernel Streaming (XP) and WASAPI (Vista), so it will output perfect pitch with bit perfectness.

Note: I have no connection with reclock. I'm just a FF400 owner that wanted to use the full potential of it, and I've just adapted reclock to allow me that. I thought it would be a good idea to share this with other RME owners.:-)

  • Registered: 2007-05-03
  • Posts: 70

Re: Use your RME to watch movies with perfect audio pitch

I've updated the instructions to reflect the addition of 2 new registry keys that will simplify the process. Just go to the link posted above and check it. I think now it's more user-friendly.;)

  • Registered: 2011-01-05
  • Posts: 36

Re: Use your RME to watch movies with perfect audio pitch

thanks for sharing yesgrey, I'll try it out smile

4 Reply by MC

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Re: Use your RME to watch movies with perfect audio pitch

> Using reclock, we just need to set our display's refresh rate to a multiple of 24

Here goes my problem - my notebook (any notebook?) doesn't let me change anything, it will run on 60 Hz and that's it. Internal Intel graphics 4 series. It seems to be tied to the specs of the internal display which only allows 60 Hz or something like that.

I would like to use Reclock to get rid of the visual judder/stutter effects of PC DVD playback on a notebook screen, but it seems this is simply not possible. A modern expensive notebook with the latest OS (no matter if Mac or PC) will never perform as good as a 30$ DVD player from your next super market - it seems. Any information or comment to that?

Regards
Matthias Carstens
RME

MC's Website

  • From: Houston, TX
  • Registered: 2007-05-11
  • Posts: 1,191

Re: Use your RME to watch movies with perfect audio pitch

MC wrote:

I would like to use Reclock to get rid of the visual judder/stutter effects of PC DVD playback on a notebook screen, but it seems this is simply not possible. A modern expensive notebook with the latest OS (no matter if Mac or PC) will never perform as good as a 30$ DVD player from your next super market - it seems. Any information or comment to that?

VLC with De-Interlacing enabled?  I don't think reclock is designed for addressing "the visual judder/stutter effects of PC DVD playback" - and I don't believe an LCD's "Refresh Rate" is linked to the actual frame rate (an LCD's "Refresh Rate" is not the same as a old CRT's refresh rate).

VLC does DVD's justice IMO - but it's still an SD source signal being up-scaled to fit a higher resolution screen - so just don't expect any miracles...

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6 Reply by MC

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Re: Use your RME to watch movies with perfect audio pitch

Randy, please do some background research on these topics. If you can not see the stutter on your computer, especially when bigger parts of the screen move to left or right, then you missed something, as it is quite obvious. The same scene will have zero stutter when viewed from a real DVD player. Reclock is the key to get rid of this problem by tying the playback speed to the monitor speed (frame rate). The pitch up down / effect that is often talked about doesn't bother me at all.

Regards
Matthias Carstens
RME

MC's Website

  • From: Houston, TX
  • Registered: 2007-05-11
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Re: Use your RME to watch movies with perfect audio pitch

Ah!  You are correct in that I generally don't see this as I generally view 60FPS video files or OTA HD ATSC on my LCD TV - but I do know what you are speaking of.  I thought Re-Clock was strictly an audio resampler - but it is clear now that it is actually affecting the video decoding and then relying on DDS to get the audio pitch to be correct.  Seems overly complicated.

So - It's not the PC itself or that the $30 DVD player is all that great - but the lack of changeable refresh rates of the video driver that are to blame?  VLC does seem to smooth out the picture and scales well compared to WMP w/o any codecs IMO.  It might have re-clocking type processing built in, but I generally don't watch 24/25FPS video on a PC (or a LCD TV connected to a PC) so I haven't dug that deep.  I think my video driver also handles this to a degree - so VLC might not be of any help on your Intel Graphics based laptop...

How are modern LCD TV's dealing with this?  I guess they simply lock their refresh rate to a multiple of the incoming video frames (the sole input source unlike a PC where you have a GUI plus Video to "think" about)?  Some video drivers will allow you to override and even create custom refresh rates - but I'm guessing Intel's onboard graphics don't fall under that umbrella smile

Good luck!  Seems like you'll need it :-)  This thread is like 20 months old now and has 7 posts.  An oldie but a goodie!

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8 Reply by yesgrey (edited by yesgrey 2011-02-03 00:47:20)

  • Registered: 2007-05-03
  • Posts: 70

Re: Use your RME to watch movies with perfect audio pitch

Sorry for the late reply, but since I never had any feedback over this thread I simply stopped following it... Today I decided to take a look and noticed a few posts...:)

MC wrote:

Here goes my problem - my notebook (any notebook?) doesn't let me change anything, it will run on 60 Hz and that's it. Internal Intel graphics 4 series. It seems to be tied to the specs of the internal display which only allows 60 Hz or something like that.

I would like to use Reclock to get rid of the visual judder/stutter effects of PC DVD playback on a notebook screen, but it seems this is simply not possible. A modern expensive notebook with the latest OS (no matter if Mac or PC) will never perform as good as a 30$ DVD player from your next super market - it seems. Any information or comment to that?

Watching films shot at 24 FPS at 60 Hz will never be a perfect experience. However, I think you might be able to at least eliminate the stuttering. Try one of these options:

(1)  in reclock config ->  "Video Settings" tab check the option "Guess a better speed when hardware refresh rate does not match"
Note: This should improve it slightly. It was created specifically for the situation you are describing (it's referred in reclock's manual)

or/and

(2)  use madVR as your video renderer. However, I don't know if your notebook Intel graphics would have enough horse power to handle the highest quality modes. You can get it here:
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=146228
Note: Currently madVR's main support site is down (it should be up again soon, I hope), but if you google about it you should be able to find the latest version for download (v0.36).

Of course that in such situation the perfect pitch without resampling regkeys should be disabled to let reclock perform its magic, but I guess that if you're watching a movie on your notebook you shouldn't be too worried to not have perfect sound... wink

Let me know if any of the above solved your problems.

9 Reply by MC

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Re: Use your RME to watch movies with perfect audio pitch

Thanks, I'll try that.

Regards
Matthias Carstens
RME

MC's Website

  • Registered: 2007-05-03
  • Posts: 70

Re: Use your RME to watch movies with perfect audio pitch

yesgrey wrote:

Note: Currently madVR's main support site is down

It's up again.

11 Reply by 1911A1 (edited by 1911A1 2012-03-19 16:39:19)

  • Registered: 2012-03-18
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Re: Use your RME to watch movies with perfect audio pitch

MC wrote:

> Using reclock, we just need to set our display's refresh rate to a multiple of 24

A modern expensive notebook with the latest OS (no matter if Mac or PC) will never perform as good as a 30$ DVD player from your next super market - it seems. Any information or comment to that?

It would if you had a real graphic card in there. Didn't think in the year 2012 that people would still use integrated video cards. ?? ?? :lol:rotfl

  • From: Houston, TX
  • Registered: 2007-05-11
  • Posts: 1,191

Re: Use your RME to watch movies with perfect audio pitch

1911A1 wrote:
MC wrote:

> Using reclock, we just need to set our display's refresh rate to a multiple of 24

A modern expensive notebook with the latest OS (no matter if Mac or PC) will never perform as good as a 30$ DVD player from your next super market - it seems. Any information or comment to that?

It would if you had a real graphic card in there. Didn't think in the year 2012 that people would still use integrated video cards. ?? ?? :lol:rotfl

I would invert your statement.  Why wouldn't more and more people in 2012 use Integrated Graphics seeing as most Integrated Graphics these days will surpass low-end discrete cards in performance and power consumption (HD2000 is about on par with a GTX210 IIRC).  I don't game, and I decided to yank out my Radeon HD5770 1GB in my new 2500K system, and I'm running the HD3000 w/o any complaints...

I agree some of the video playback format support should be improved on Intel's side, but for the unquestionable majority (all but a few percent of the total computer market), modern onboard graphics are completely adequate - and well on their way to becoming overkill (HD5000 on Ivy Bridge, AMD's current APU's, etc)

Times are changing... cool

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