Installation

Starting with MediaPortal 1.3.0 Alpha, the MediaPortal Audio Renderer is already included in your MediaPortal installation.

Configuration

Enable the MPAR

Per default, MediaPortal is not using the MPAR as Audio Renderer. This might be changed in later releases of MediaPortal.

To select the MPAR as Audio Renderer, head over to MediaPortal Configuration -> Codecs and Renderer. There you can enable MPAR as audio renderer in the Video, TV, DVD and Blu-ray codecs tabs.

Change MPAR Options

(click image to enlage)

Right next to the drop down menu for the Audio Renderer option, you see a small screwdriver symbol. With this you can access the options of the selected filter.

Output Format

• Speaker Setup
  Here you can select what kind of speaker setup you are using on your system.
• Sample
  MPAR is able to change the sample rate of the audio. This can be required if you are using AC3 encoding to ensure that your connected receiver will receive a specific sample rate. Many devices will only work with specific sample rates
• Resampling
  Use to change the audio sampling rate conversion quality. For more information: //www.mega-nerd.com/SRC/api_misc.html
  • SRC_SINC_BEST_QUALITY
  • SRC_SINC_MEDIUM_QUALITY
  • SRC_SINC_FASTEST
  • SRC_ZERO_ORDER_HOLD
  • SRC_LINEAR (default) 
• Bit depth
  Force some specific bit depth to be used (16, 24, 32). 0 lets the renderer itself pick the best one.
• Fore up/down mixing
  If the number of audio channels from the video you play does not match the number of speakers from your speaker setup, then you can tell MPAR to always up or downmix the audio to adjust to your speaker setup. Most of the time you should let the audio-video receiver do the up/downmixing.
• Expand mono to stereo
  If the received audio stream is mono, MPAR will expand it to a stereo stream. Default setting is on and should not be changed. Many audio devices and audio filters have massive issues with mono audio streams.

AC3 Encoding

• Mode
  • Auto: If the amount of channels received by MPAR matches the speaker setup, then the audio will be encoded into an AC3 stream. If you i.e. have your speaker setup set to 5.1, and only receive a stereo audio stream from the video, then the audio will not be encoded into an AC3 stream.
  • Forced: Always output an AC3 stream. In this case, if you have your speaker setup set to 5.1, and only receive a stereo audio stream from the video, then the audio will also be encoded into an AC3 stream.
• Bitrate
  Here you can select the desired bitrate of the AC3 stream that is created by MPAR.

Audio Delay

Depending on how your speakers are connected to your PC (i.e. VGA to TV and SPDIF to dolby-receiver), you might have to add an audio delay to compensate the difference between the signal speed of audio and video transmissions, which causes a synchronization issue.

Debug

When creating a bug report, a developer might ask you to enable this debug option to additionally log sample times.
Log files might be very large with this option enabled which is why it is disabled by default.

Processing

• Enable v-sync adjustment
  Toggles between v-sync adjustments on / off. By default this is on. Use only for debugging purposes (like sync drifting).
• Enable timestrech
  Enables all the audio renderer's special features to work (should only be disabled to check if some issue is also reproducible with it disabled). Enabled by default.

Audio Device

• PreferredDevice (drop down menu):
  Audio end point device (where the audio is played). If left empty it will use Windows' default which should be OK most of the time.
• Use Exclusive Mode
  Uses WASAPI exclusive mode. Enabled by default.
• Use Event driven Mode
  Uses WASAPI event driven mode. Enabled by default (causes issues on some hardware and drivers where no proper support is available).

MPAR & (LAV) Audio Decoder

When you use the LAV Audio Decoder in combination with the MediaPortal Audio Renderer, make sure you keep ALL bitstreaming Formats and the Auto A/V Sync correction option UNchecked (because these settings break the functionality of the MediaPortal Audio Renderer).