The VideoLAN Forums

Hi all. I apologize if this has been addressed before but I couldn't find anything searching Google or these forums so I hope I can get some help here. Whenever I try to play large mkv files (usually the in the 10-12GB range for 1080p movies) the sound is just awful. It's muddled and staticy, as if there were a jet engine roaring in the background of every scene. It's usually most prominent during sound effects and music playing, and not so much with scenes of pure dialogue.

I know the files themselves are good, and the bad sound persists whether playing through my laptop, my Bose earphones, or my television (streamed via HDMI), so I know it isn't an issue of poor quality hardware. In addition, I just tried another media player (Nero Showtime to be exact - it was the only other thing on my computer that played mkvs) and the sound quality was perfect. I'm almost certain it must be a VLC issue. I read somewhere that enabling the spatializer can help, and indeed it does help a bit when I maximize the "dry" tab to 1 and reduce the others down (no idea what that means; I got there from tinkering), however, that creates audio imperfections of its own and the sound doesn't match the default sound of Nero. In addition, having to manually enable the spatializer every time I wanted to play an mkv would be a huge pain (as it doesn't remember).

Any idea what's going on? It must be a setting somewhere I can change, but I have no idea how to fix it. Thanks all.

Please open Tools -> Messages (set Verbosity to 2) before you start the playback and then paste the full resulting log here or on Pastebin.com if it's too long.

Also upload a short sample of a problematic file to either http://streams.videolan.org/upload/ or to EmbedUpload.com, the latter will upload the file for you to several other hosts and then post the link to the file here.

Cut it with DGsplit and read here about how to do it:
viewtopic.php?f=14&t=57724&p=193335#p193335
50 MB max should be enough.

The files in question contain copyrighted content, so I feel uncomfortable uploading them. Would the DMCA consider it fair use since it's a short clip purely for diagnostic purposes? As for the debugging, the first time when I played through a particularly obnoxious sounding bit, the resulting log was pretty short:
main debug: auto hiding mouse cursor
main debug: auto hiding mouse cursor
main debug: audio output is starving (-221364), playing silence
main debug: auto hiding mouse cursor
main debug: auto hiding mouse cursor

However, I then pressed play again and launched the debugging window, and things got a little more interesting: main debug: auto hiding mouse cursor
main debug: auto hiding mouse cursor
main debug: audio output is starving (-221364), playing silence
main debug: auto hiding mouse cursor
main debug: auto hiding mouse cursor
main debug: auto hiding mouse cursor
main debug: auto hiding mouse cursor
main debug: audio output is starving (-208080), playing silence
main debug: auto hiding mouse cursor
main debug: auto hiding mouse cursor
main error: ES_OUT_SET_(GROUP_)PCR is called too late (pts_delay increased to 300 ms)
main error: ES_OUT_RESET_PCR called
main warning: early picture skipped
main debug: End of audio preroll
main debug: Buffering 0%
main debug: Stream buffering done (324 ms in 0 ms)
main debug: End of video preroll
main debug: Received first picture
main debug: Decoder buffering done in 52 ms
main warning: PTS is out of range (-9987), dropping buffer
main warning: PTS is out of range (-20628), dropping buffer
main warning: PTS is out of range (-31280), dropping buffer
main warning: audio output out of sync, adjusting dates (90473 us)
main warning: not synchronized (90474 us), resampling
main warning: buffer too late (90810), up-sampling
main warning: picture is too late to be displayed (missing 89 ms)
main warning: picture is too late to be displayed (missing 47 ms)
main debug: picture might be displayed late (missing 5 ms)
main debug: auto hiding mouse cursor
main debug: auto hiding mouse cursor
main debug: auto hiding mouse cursor
main debug: auto hiding mouse cursor
main debug: auto hiding mouse cursor
main debug: auto hiding mouse cursor

However, there were no obvious out of sync issues (nor have there ever really been), just consistently crappy audio on files that are supposed to have outstanding audio. Also worth noting is that this isn't on all large mkvs. I have a couple that play quite well. Also bear in mind this isn't coming from an audiophile. In fact, I rarely ever care about audio quality (most 700mb avis sound just great to me), but this is so bad that even I (and my friends) have noticed and commented.

Sorry but I asked for the FULL complete log and we do need a sample file for testing purposes.