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I have a video file with the audio codec "Dolby TrueHD 7.1 ATMOS" but the audio won't come out at all. I've tried vlc, avplay and a bunch of other players. I even updated vlc to 2.2 and libav-tools to 11

How do I play such a file? Preferably in VLC!!!

You can get a sample file from here. Make sure you download a file with "Dolby TrueHD 7.1 ATMOS" audio. The "Conductor " file is 40MB

Braiam
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842Mono
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  • Do you have the equipment necessary to play it? See http://www.engadget.com/2008/01/22/how-to-actually-use-dolby-truehd-and-dts-hd/ for clarification. If you are downmixing it anyway to use fewer speakers you aren't actually hearing the content in question. – Elder Geek Feb 08 '16 at 19:18
  • @ElderGeek yes I'm down-mixing it to 4 channels (+subwoofer) .. I know I'm not getting the best out of it but that doesn't mean I should watch the video without sound :P and btw I could get it to work (see sol. below) and the audio quality is much much better than files with 4 channel audio – 842Mono Feb 11 '16 at 21:28
  • Related: http://www.audioholics.com/audio-technologies/5-reasons-dolby-atmos-is-doa – Elder Geek Feb 12 '16 at 14:56
  • I just installed kodi for Macos. It plays the conductor file fine to my very recent (summer 2016) Onkyo TX-RZ810 via HDMI from my macbook. The amp says its Dolby 7:1, but doesn't seem to recognize that it's Atmos. My understanding is that Atmos has the to ceiling speakers (bouncing off ceiling in my case with Onkyo SKS-HT5BB(B) speakers) whereas 7.1 has extra surround speakers. So it's great to finally get 8 channels working but disappointed that I don't get the vertical volume effect from the ceiling yet. Still searching ... –  Jul 25 '16 at 16:24

2 Answers2

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VLC

The current stable release of VLC (2.2.4) does not support Dolby Atmos 7.1 sound.

The current nightly build of version 3 does support Dolby Atmos. The fix was committed on February 2nd, 2017. There is a closed ticket on this issue.

mplayer

mplayer supports Dolby Atmos TrueHD 7.1 as of sometime before 2017.

I have not been able to find exactly when this was fixed in mplayer. It seems it was fixed in ffmpeg, which mplayer uses, back in 2015.

See http://trac.ffmpeg.org/ticket/3960 for more history.

Kodi

Kodi uses mplayer for video playback and therefore will support TrueHD audio as long as the underlying mplayer version does.

Cameron Tacklind
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well I just tried kodi and it played the audio just fine! The user interface is INCREDIBLE!!!!!!

To install kodi:

make sure you have this installed:

sudo apt-get install software-properties-common

then you can use this repository and install:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-xbmc/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install kodi

...still I'd want VLC to play it. Anyone knows where to get the missing (whatever) codec for VLC?

842Mono
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