XBMC Gets Its New HD Audio Engine

AudioEngine has been merged in the XBMC media player code-base, which is a major re-write of the audio sub-system and delivers some wonderful HD audio support.

Writing XBMC AudioEngine took two years and more than 22,000 lines of code, but it's now been merged. AudioEngine brings high-definition audio to this popular open-source multi-media program. AudioEngine also introduces support for DTS-MA, TrueHD, and 24-bit audio.

The official features of XBMC AudioEngine at this time are listed below. Still forthcoming are rule-based decisions for output formats based upon hardware capabilities, support for a range of DSPs, and custom channel mixing/mapping for up and down-mixing. Additional details are available from the XBMC.org blog.

- Support for DTS-MA / Dolby TrueHD Bluray formats
- Support for 24-bit and floating-point audio at up to 384,000hz
- Mixing of all streams including GUI sounds even when transcoding audio
- Start-up enumeration of hardware audio devices and their capablities with log output
- Bitstreaming support in PAPlayer (XBMC’s music player)
- Upmixing of stereo to full channel layout
- Tighter syncing of A/V streams
- Floating-point processing of audio
- 24-bit and floating-point decoding/handling of mp3
- Full support for ReplayGain
- Built-in sample-rate conversion and transcoding