Beyond Advanced - A/V Track file disappearing bug and missing audio channels

[bgadhia]

Hi

I've been trying to see if it would be feasible to use our Beyond PC for our Video and Audio playback (multi channel )following a master sync source.

The sync and the video playback seem to be working ok, the issue's I'm facing are audio related.



The first is a bug that randomly any Wav files appear to become lost and show the cross / unavailable icon and cannot be played. Removing and re-adding the file to the same track does not help.
The bug does seem to be related to the audio device drivers. Restarting the system or exiting out of beyond and enabling and disabling the Default audio device seems to fix it for a while.



The second issue is related to adding a Video file to the media track. Its a test video with 7.1 Audio embedded on it, and i've verified that their are 8 channels of audio in Quicktime and VLC however, when looking at the media information in beyond, it is showing that it only has 6 channels.

Has anyone else run into these issue and any suggestions for finding the source / fixing them

 

[ENOT]

BEYOND software allows to use mono and stereo audio files only. We are considering adding multi channel support, however, it is not a top priority area. Each implementation has a limit of some kind. BEYOND support stereo audio. If you has problems with stereo files - let us know.

 

[bgadhia]

Sorry for the late reply.

Appreciate you coming and clarifying this, as I was unable to find this limitation in the documentation (It may be there but I probably missed it)

Having multichannel support would be great as it would make life easy for us as it would allow us to have once less system / player in our setups.

If you do get around to adding multichannel support, please do consider adding ASIO support along with the standard windows directshow as most professional multichannel IO's need asio to route the audio correctly and while there are ways around, they can be a pain.

 

[ENOT]

OK, appeared that I was wrong - BEYOND has support of multi channels audio. I got a multiple files for 5.1 speaker test including audio and video, at least 10 different 5.1 files, and no problem. BEYOND can open and play it. Because I think problem is somewhere else.

ASIO is out of scope. BEYOND AV subsystem use DirectSound.

 

[bgadhia]

OK, appeared that I was wrong - BEYOND has support of multi channels audio. I got a multiple files for 5.1 speaker test including audio and video, at least 10 different 5.1 files, and no problem. BEYOND can open and play it. Because I think problem is somewhere else.

ASIO is out of scope. BEYOND AV subsystem use DirectSound.

Hmm, will need to test with the 7.1 file again to see if the audio is being routed correctly to all channels despite what the media panel is saying.

I can understand the difficulty of adding ASIO, so its a wishlist item. Still, even using directshow, is it possible to use custom directshow fliters like THIS Multichannel Direct show to ASIO filter to do the routing.

 

[bgadhia]

Just wanted to post an additional update.

I found that the bug with the disappearing wav files only seems to appear when wing a multichannel audio card like the Asus Xonar u7 or a Creative 7.1 card.

I found that if i'm using the system's built in audio card (realtek) in this case. the Wav file with 8 channels of audio will play fine, though will be mixed down to stereo. When I change the Playback device to the 7.1 card, the Error appears. Changing back to the Default card and restarting Beyond seems to fix it. But it obviously doesn't work for my purposes.

I've had decent success with playing out 7.1 audio embedded in the video file, though the media info still only shows 6 channels of audio. It still looks like the two of the channels are mixing when they shouldn't but that is most like an issue with the video file and not beyond's playback. We're still testing, so will report back.

We've having beyond chase artnet timecode as that was the easiest way for us to get beyond in sync as we did not have any SMPTE interfaces handy, and the control system did not have a smpte or midi timecode out.

We've run into a couple of bugs, such a audio just stopping playing when the video and Laser's continued but started up again when we manually scrubbed back a few seconds and put the system back in sync and the audio going out of sync even when TC in is on. Its only happened a couple of times so we're trying to isolate when and why it happens.