Bug#913344: The "Headphone virtual spatialization effect" setting not working in VLC 3.X when the "Force detection of Dolby Surround" setting is enabled
Package: vlc
Version: 3.0.3-1
Since Debian stable switched to VLC 3.X I started to notice the problem
with "Headphone virtual spatialization effect" setting. I was able to
reproduce the problem consistently with VLC 3.0.3 from Debian stable
repository. I did not test this in Debian unstable as I have no sound
enabled in my test VM (but my guess is that the problem should be also
reproducible in unstable).
Enabling the "Headphone virtual spatialization effect" setting causes
audio tracks (including in songs not just in videos) to become garbled
and especially speech is not understandable. After disabling the setting
the audio tracks play normally. In previous versions (before VLC 3.X)
the "Headphone virtual spatialization effect" setting enabled a usable
surround sound experience even for stereo audio tracks with normal
stereo headphones, so it is missed greatly.
Noticed with various files and various audio/video codecs (all files
which I tested up to now, so sample should be easy to obtain).
The "Headphone virtual spatialization effect" setting can be found in
VLC advanced/all settings in "Audio > Filters". The specific settings in
the "~/.config/vlc/vlcrc" file are:
audio-filter=headphone
force-dolby-surround=1
headphone-compensate=1
headphone-dim=3
and after further testing i noticed that the combination of the
"audio-filter=headphone" with "force-dolby-surround=1" is what causes
the problem.
I had both settings enabled because the following extract from the
"Force detection of Dolby Surround" option tooltip seemed to be true:
"... Even if the stream is not actually encoded with Dolby Surround,
turning on this option might enhance your experience, especially when
combined with the Headphone Channel Mixer." (assuming "Headphone virtual
spatialization effect" is "Headphone Channel Mixer" as I found no other
similar VLC setting that contains string "Headphone").
Regards,
Bakhelit
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