I need help trying to diagnose a problem that I encounter just recently. I watched John Wick on Bluray this last weekend and the audio was a mess. The audio was cutting in and out like the Outlaw had trouble either locking down the bitstream or decoding it. I believe that John Wick is a Dolby Atmos encode, now i don't know if that causes a problem or not. I have an Oppo 83 as my bluray player and I've also contacted them to help me narrow down this problem. My Oppo is conected directly to the Outlaw via HDMI.

A couple of things I tried with no success and a resolution I found worked but not ideal. The first thing i tried was a complete power cycle of my components, that didn't work. I also tried 3 different HDMI cables also with no success. I did find a work around by having the Oppo decode the signal and send PCM audio,via HDMI, to the Outlaw. It's a solution just not ideal for me.

I believe I have the lastest firmware for the Outlaw. Is there anything else I could try for a solution or has anyone experienced this before? Or is this solely an Oppo problem?
Thanks in advance,
Jason

I'm fairly certain that unless you have a processor that supports Dolby Atmos, you will have to set the Oppo to output PCM. The 975 obviously isn't Atmos capable.

Since neither the BDP-83 or the 975 are Atmos enabled I think PCM is the only way to get the signal to the 975 for processing although from what I have read the OPPO should be able to decode the 7.1 stream.

Here's the explanation:
The Atmos titles have 7.1 THD audio and use a complex seamless branching protection scheme. The audio dropout issues are the result of that combination and have nothing to do with the Atmos encoding. The BDP-83 is actually quite capable of bitstreaming Atmos audio in its 7.1 THD wrapper. Without getting too far into the technical reasons for this issue, suffice it to say that 7.1 THD requires more processing power to bitstream when combined with the complex seamless branching, and many older players don't have the poop to handle it. Think: buffering issues. DTS-MA 7.1 does not create these problems even with complex seamless branching.

If you have the capability to rip a BD and eliminate the seamless branching - burn that to a BD-R and the Oppo should handle it fine. The Oppo 93 has the same problem, the newer 103/103D do not since they have a dual-core chip and more memory.

Thanks for the responses, especially since I haven't heard back from my Oppo inquiry. So just to clarify for my own understanding. Due to new protection schemes the Oppo is unable to bitstream the Dolby TrueHD signal to my Outlaw? So there is no problem with my Outlaw, sigh of relief. The work around of have it decode the signal then send LPCM to my Outlaw, as of now, is the only working solution. Unless I get a new BD player. Which I will do, once the 4K standard has been finalized and Oppo releases a new player for that standard. Unfortunately i can not rip BD to eliminate the branching. However this brings up a new concern. Is this new scheme going to affect the other codecs and cause problems? Or is it just going to affect Dolby TrueHD Atmos ones?

Thanks for all the help

Are discs available which do not include 7.1 the for ATMOS or are we saying the BPD-83 is obsolete for future releases. It almost sounds like dolby atmos is not compliant with the previous versions. If that is the case I will no longer be buying atmos encoded discs.

I'm sure Oppo answered you if you sent an email or web contact. It probably wound up in your spam filter.

Anyhow, no its not "all" TrueHD, only 7.1 where complex seamless branching is used. TrueHD is exceptionally demanding on processors, 7.1 more so than 5.1. There should be no issues at all with 7.1 DTS even where seamless branching is used, but its not impossible if they go crazy with the protection.

Complex seamless branching protection is used in combination with playlist obfuscation, by means of the JAVA code that's on the disc. If the JAVA code smells a disc copy it picks the wrong playlist and you get a scrambled movie and/or copy protection warnings. Most of these type movies use dozens of smaller video files to stitch together the movie from - instead of one large video file like any sane movie mastering would use.

We've yet to see an Atmos release that does not include 7.1 audio, so it may be safe to assume that 7.1 is required to correctly encode the Atmos "object based" audio. These disc do also include a compatibility audio track you can select rather than the 7.1 Atmos track.

The good news is that Atmos audio mastering, (and Dolby TrueHD in general), is exceptionally expensive to master, difficult to decode, and generally a PITA for movie studios, so don't expect movie studios to jump into releasing Atmos encoded films in large numbers. Right now, Dolby is sweetening the pot for them to use it but that won't last forever. The other upcoming "3D" audio flavors, Auro and DTS, actually stand a better chance of widespread adoption due to lower licensing fees and production costs.

Also good to note that most of the current crop of Pre/Pro and AVRs also offer their own proprietary "3D' audio DSP which by some accounts actually work better.

My expectation or fear is that the studios will jump on the ATMOS bandwagon like they did for 3D and start encoding every disc with the new format which essentially would make my OPPO BDP-83 obsolete for newer discs. I would fully expect that DTS-X will also do the same thing. I don't buy many discs and where I live streaming is out of the question (no bandwidth) so I use NetFlix to watch new releases. If all the discs become contaminated with ATMOS and DTS-X I will have to buy a new player.