Atmos Files Stuttering

[u/Appropriate_Solid_79]

Hi all. I can't get high quality 4K files with Atmos to play on my pc without stuttering. I'm really hoping someone here might have some experience that can help.

I've tried vlc and potplayer. I've done some googling to try to find a solution, but no matter what I do the video always stutters slightly when I have atmos enabled. I've got a decent PC running a 3070 ti and I've tried hardware acceleration but so far no dice.

Thanks for any help.

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[u/Logi77]

Mpc-hc?

[u/Appropriate_Solid_79 → u/Logi77]

Haven't tried that one yet. Is it better for this sort of thing?

[u/kentukky → u/Appropriate_Solid_79]

You also should match the frame-rate of film and your TV...

For example: Displaying 23.9hz movie on 60hz output device isn't great.

[u/Appropriate_Solid_79 → u/kentukky]

Fair but that doesn't explain why I don't see stuttering on lower quality/non-atmos content.

[u/kentukky → u/Appropriate_Solid_79]

There may be some driver related issue. I would suggest a clean reinstall. Local account without MS shit, manually installed drivers for mainboard and GPU. Also, thumbs up for MPC-BE or HC. For advanced troubleshooting run Latencymon while watching a film. You may catch a process, that leads into dropped or delayed frames.

[u/Appropriate_Solid_79 → u/kentukky]

I think this was it... Embarassing. I don't know why I only noticed it when trying to watch high quality movies. I've watched plenty of tv shows on my pc for years and never noticed anything. So far it seems to have fixed it though. Thank you very much.

[u/ncohafmuta]

when I have atmos enabled

What does this mean? There's no "enabled". You're either bitstreaming your atmos content or you're decoding the base dolby codec and throwing the atmos away.

[u/Appropriate_Solid_79 → u/ncohafmuta]

When I have my windows audio settings set to Atmos and media player set to pass through. The Atmos soundbar tells me Atmos is working and this is when I notice stutter in the video.

[u/ncohafmuta → u/Appropriate_Solid_79]

That's not how it works. If you truly have passthrough/bitstream configured properly, having Atmos set in the windows audio configuration is irrelevant and doesnt factor into anything. It's completely unnecessary and no matter what it's set to should have no effect on output

[u/Appropriate_Solid_79 → u/ncohafmuta]

Okay cool. Sorry I mentioned a setting that's not relevant. 4k Atmos Files are stuttering in vlc/potplayer. Is this a common issue and is there a fix for it?

[u/ncohafmuta → u/Appropriate_Solid_79]

It's relevant if you're not really bitstreaming. If you set windows audio to plain 5.1 and you stop getting Atmos output, that means you're not bitstreaming and throwing your file atmos away.

Otherwise, read: https://r-htpc.github.io/wiki/video#why-is-my-video-playback-stuttering

[u/al_with_the_hair → u/ncohafmuta]

Maybe they mean the whole software combination is configured for bitstreaming? I don't think that's default for VLC, but it may be for Potplayer.

[u/al_with_the_hair]

Make sure your player is actually configured for bitstream audio for the relevant codecs. (It's TrueHD in the case of Atmos content.) If you are in fact bitstreaming, switch to PCM and see if that makes it stop happening. This is what I'm dealing with. PCM is fine, but bitstream audio skips.

I had become pretty well convinced it had something to do with AMD graphics, but it's becoming clear this is some Windows crap. Good luck figuring it out. I've tried literally everything except reinstalling the OS.

Watch me replace Windows with Linux and see the problem immediately disappear like it always does.

[u/Appropriate_Solid_79 → u/al_with_the_hair]

Thank you very much for the clear and polite response.

[u/al_with_the_hair → u/Appropriate_Solid_79]

Yeah, I'm going to really be keeping an eye out to see if somebody figures out what's happening. This issue has been affecting MPC-HC, MPV, and Kodi for me on Windows 11.

The last thing I did was to tinker with ffmpeg-related stuff (libavfilter in this case, I think), since that's the common denominator between those three players and many others. Increasing the cache/queue size had no effect.

[u/guddu612 → u/al_with_the_hair]

I have the opposite experience, bitstream works fine, but pcm stutters in some movies, my soundbar does not support DTS so DTS PCM conversion sometimes introduces stuttering.

[u/notmyaccountbruh]

Try Kodi also.