[mythtv-users] dual (bilingual) sound

Michael T. Dean mtdean at thirdcontact.com
Tue Nov 29 17:54:33 EST 2005


On 11/29/05 15:08, Petr Stehlik wrote:

>Michael T. Dean píše v Út 29. 11. 2005 v 14:06 -0500:
>
>>>does MythTV support dual sound (instead of normal stereo sound)? You
>>>know, some movies are broadcasted with dual sound - left channel of
>>>stereo sound is used for one language and the right channel is used for
>>>another language. Most often for translated/original sound. Is this
>>>supported in MythTV? If it isn't, any idea how to add it most easily? It
>>>basically requires to take just one channel and to send it as mono sound
>>>out. And to allow user to switch between the channels (lang1/lang2)
>>>would be a nice bonus.
>>>
>>In frontend settings:
>>
>>Independent Muting of Left and Right Audio
>>Enable muting of just the left or right channel.  Useful if your 
>>broadcaster puts the original language on one channel, and a dubbed 
>>version of the program on the other one.  This modifies the behavior of 
>>the Mute key.
>>    
>>
>Sounds great, but as I said, it should also switch the output to mono
>(both left and right speakers should get the same signal from the
>selected channel/language) and most importantly, it should work
>automagically.
>  
>
Geez.  Let me hold your hand while we test this out...

Let's start up mythfrontend.  Now, choose "Utilities and Settings", then 
"Setup", then "General".  Now, click "Next" until page 3, "Audio."  
Let's mark the "Independent Muting of Left and Right Audio Channels" 
checkbox.  Now, click "Next" until page 7, "Mythfilldatabase."  Finally, 
click "Finish."

OK, now we've set it.  Let's see what happens.  Press Escape until you 
get back to the main menu.  Then select Watch TV or go to one of your 
recordings and play it.  Now, hit the mute key.  Hold on!  It says, 
"Left Channel Muted."  But that can't be...  There's sound coming out of 
both the left and right speaker.  It must not work.  Now, if I push mute 
again, it says "Right Channel Muted," but I'm still hearing sound in 
both speakers.  And if I push mute again, it says, "Mute On," and I 
don't hear anything until I push mute again ("Mute Off").

Well, sorry for wasting your time.  I guess the feature doesn't work 
because there's /no possible way in the entire world/ that someone else 
would have wanted the feature to work the way you want (cloning the 
unmuted channel for playback on the muted channel, as well).  So, since 
I heard audio coming from both speakers, that must mean that this 
feature just doesn't work.  It lies to me, saying that one channel is 
muted, but it's not.

<disclaimer>This post is full of sarcasm.  Sarcasm is the price I'm 
asking you to pay for assuming that you--the guy asking the 
question--know, without testing, that a feature you didn't know existed 
until I mentioned it to you doesn't work the way you want.  Since your 
time was so precious that you couldn't just test it yourself to see 
that--despite your "there's no way it works the way *I* want it to work" 
preconceptions--it works exactly like you want.  I figure this price is 
reasonable considering your blind dismissal of the suggestion caused me 
to spend more time on this reply than you would have spent testing it, 
had you accepted the advice with an open mind.  Granted, I choose to 
take this time to try once again to convince you to take my advice, so I 
hope this approach was more beneficial to you than the other approach I 
would have taken (ignoring your refusal to test it and letting you 
suffer without the feature).</disclaimer>

OK, so now that we've ascertained that it does in fact work the way you 
want, we just have one more issue--how to make it work automagically.  
So, how do you propose we do that?  Don't you have to make the decision 
which audio channel you can understand/you want to hear?  Since the 
audio is analog, there's no metadata to describe which channel contains 
which information (i.e. which language), so anything Myth does would be 
just guessing.  If you can verify that certain channels always use the 
same configuration (i.e. English on left, Spanish on right or 
something), however, I'm sure it would be relatively easy to include a 
mute setting in the new playback group feature, but if the configuration 
changes, even that's not worth the effort.

Sorry for the attitude.  It seems that blind dismissals of suggestions 
are causing me to spend more time re-answering questions to convince 
someone it's worth their time to test my suggestions than I spend 
answering questions.  The follow-up is taking all my time and making me 
question using my time to answer questions in the first place since many 
of my suggestions are just being ignored.  Your post just happened to be 
in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Feel free to flame me, but please 
do so off-list (for everyone else's sake).

Mike


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