HD Homerun ASTC 3.0 Stations Audio Issue on Recordings

mobilelawyer · October 7, 2024, 2:42pm

I had a strange situation develop with a football game I recorded two weeks ago using Channels DVR software and my HD Homerun 4K ASTC 3.0 tuner. I assumed the game would be recorded off the local ABC channel which has the virtual number 3.1, but instead the game was recorded off the ASTC 3.0 channel for that station which has the number 103.1.

The recording plays back fine if you use the Channels software, but if I copied the file to another location to edit out the commercials, no sound was heard on VLC Player, Windows Media Player or the Movies and TV app on windows 11. Video was still perfect. I then remembered that I had also recorded the game on the seperate HD Homerun software, but it was also recorded from channel 103.1 and had the same audio problem. It played back fine using the HD Homerun software, but had no audio if you tried to play it back by other means.

This experience caused me to go back and disable ASTC 3.0 channels on the HD homerun software as well as Channels DVR to ensure this problem does not happen again.

I had the software to record games from my team on All channels, so I would never miss a televised game, but I need sound on my recordings, so I removed the ASTC 3.0 channels from my list.

By the way, the local channel is not encrypted, but there must be some DRM component that is causing this problem.

Has anyone else experienced this?

spud · October 7, 2024, 3:08pm

Not exactly the same thing, but I have had to also disable the 3.0 stations because the signal strength would suddenly become very weak and unrecordable. ATSC 3.0 is still clearly someone's science fair experiment, and while I hope all the kinks get worked out (including encryption), I do not have very high expectations for it.

elvisimprsntr · October 7, 2024, 3:33pm

Some stations are broadcasting in AC-4 10 channel audio (5.1.4), in particular Sinclair, which no third party player supports due to Dolby licensing fees, including VLC. I think there is a hack for FFMPEG, but I think it requires one to recompile from source.

mobilelawyer · October 7, 2024, 3:46pm

Ah ha! This is in fact a Sinclair channel.

IwantWMC · October 7, 2024, 11:15pm

Oh, I need to find that hack. It's frustrating trying to watch a football game but there's no audio because of this issue that's completely unrelated to Channels DVR.

elvisimprsntr · October 8, 2024, 2:53am

@IwantWMC

https://trac.ffmpeg.org/ticket/8349

speedingcheetah · October 8, 2024, 3:26am

Normal. There is no video player software on PC/Mac that can play AC4 audio. Has not been for a while, and no one appears to care.

U need to use a ffmpeg that is compiled with AC4 audio support, and remux your recording converting AC4 to AC3.

I made a thread post about this long time ago.

AC4 audio from recording file on PC? (ATSC 3.0) Convert to AC3 - Channels DVR Server - Channels Community (getchannels.com)

jkr4m3r · October 8, 2024, 3:51am

The easier way for me was to simply edit the pass for NFL games and specify that it uses channel < 100. Disabling channels always ended up causing an issue down the road for me.