Panasonic's Blu-Ray players support FLAC, Moved from FLAC forum (TOS #6) Options

[krafty]

In fact it looks like all Panasonic 2012 BR Players are supporting FLAC.
Anyone's already got their hands on this? Review? Gapless? Albumart? Replaygain?
I would consider this a milestone and certainly will be looking for an unit...

http://shop.panasonic.com/shop/model/DMP-BD87?t=specs

http://shop.panasonic.com/shop/model/DMP-BD77?t=specs

[Nick.C]

I've got the DMP-BDT220EB and it plays FLAC (so does my Panasonic TV....).

Gapless : No;
Albumart : No;
ReplayGain: No;

[edit] model number failure.... [/edit]

This post has been edited by Nick.C: Sep 4 2012, 22:09

[krafty]

Can you tell me about yout Pana TV... what model is it? Gapless/RG/Art or the same stuff....?

[slks]

Gapless : No;

Question about this. I was under the impression that the "gapless" issue was only applicable to MP3s (and maybe other lossy codecs). If I remember correctly, the last frame of an MP3 has to be totally filled and gets padded with a millisecond or so of silence to fill out the frame. "Gapless data" is an extension to the format that gets written in the LAME header, which tells the encoder how to overlap the audio for that millisecond to eliminate the audible gap.

But since FLAC is lossless, there's no "gap" that gets added - each sample remains identical from first to last.

So any issue with gaps appearing between FLACs would be down to poor coding in the player, and not anything intrinsic to the FLAC files?

This post has been edited by slks: Sep 5 2012, 07:51

[Kohlrabi]

So any issue with gaps appearing between FLACs would be down to poor coding in the player, and not anything intrinsic to the FLAC files?

Seeing the amount of players and audio frameworks which do not support gapless playback, my impression is that missing gapless support is not due poor coding, but that gapless support is more a sign of advanced coding skills. This is merely based on my assumption that most multimedia programmers are not bad.

Though my understanding is that you play audio from a sample buffer instead of reading it per-file, and upon an incoming track change you start to append samples from the upcoming file to the buffer to attain gapless playback.

[Peter]

So any issue with gaps appearing between FLACs would be down to poor coding in the player, and not anything intrinsic to the FLAC files?

Long explanation:
It is an issue that needs to be addressed early when designing the player software, rather than your typical coding error that can be corrected -
The player must decide which track to play next before completing playback of the previous track, in order to start decoding it when the previous track can still be heard.
Players not specifically designed to be gapless simply finish playing a track, then decide what track to play next, then start playing the next track.

And to answer your question: yes, there's nothing wrong with the FLAC files, the FLAC format is inherently gapless and can be always decoded back to the PCM stream that was originally encoded into it, without gaps added; any gaps are inflicted by the playback software.

[probedb]

By playback do you mean from a USB stick etc or over DLNA? I'm sure my TV plays them too however I use a Squeezebox for audio.

[krafty]

[edit] model number failure.... [/edit]

I think that if the 220 is like that, probably the low-end versions such as 77 and 87 behave exactly the same.
Does the software look like a 4 square tiles like up/down/right/left positions plus the concept of layers??

[Nick.C]

Pretty much - although navigation has improved over the last few firmware upgrades. It works well with my WHS2011 servers (as network drives).

The TV is a Viera TX-L47ET5B (same as Blu-Ray player - not gapless due to time taken to open next track as Peter elaborated upon....).

[edit] There are issues with DLNA - it won't play some files that play fine from USB or data disc. [/edit]

This post has been edited by Nick.C: Sep 5 2012, 17:23

[krafty]

Nick.C

Even with the limitations, I am interested in purchasing a unit. Last "DVD" Player I had from Pana was really good meaning that I could "make my playlist" and tell it to play, furthermore, the gaps between the MP3 files were like less than 1 second. I was wondering how long it takes the gap from one song to another using FLAC on this BDP Pana unit. Can you make playlists and such?

This post has been edited by krafty: Sep 6 2012, 01:45