Odd AAC sound playing back HD recordings in VLC

[Philbert]

Trying out Pot Player on my scoddy work PC, looks very promising!
No picture oddities and from what I can hear of the sound, no VLC type problems there either.
I'll leave it playing Raiders all the way through in the background (hope my superv doesn't see) and see how it goes.
Too early to say until I get it on my proper PC though...

 

[Philbert]

Pot Player had similar frame skipping/ffwding as the others, plus a less severe variant of the VLC sound. Tweaking its internals only made small (if any) differences.

Went back to VLC as its the only one with perfect picture, and started playing around with the ffdshow .dlls and eventually got something working.

I found that if you replace the libfaad_plugin.dll in VLC with a renamed copy of ff_libfaad2.dll from the MPC-HC install, the sound in VLC appears to work perfectly! I didn't discover this until late last night (surprised it worked really) so I have only about 15-20mins of FLAWLESS playback in VLC to go by so far, but I think I may have cracked it.

 

[Placemat]

I have the same issue with my Freeview HD recordings (with 5.1 AAC). You will also find that VLC crashes when you try to seek within a video file that contains muti-channel audio and stereo audio (during adverts).

 

[JefUK]

Pot Player had similar frame skipping/ffwding as the others, plus a less severe variant of the VLC sound. Tweaking its internals only made small (if any) differences.

Went back to VLC as its the only one with perfect picture, and started playing around with the ffdshow .dlls and eventually got something working.

I found that if you replace the libfaad_plugin.dll in VLC with a renamed copy of ff_libfaad2.dll from the MPC-HC install, the sound in VLC appears to work perfectly! I didn't discover this until late last night (surprised it worked really) so I have only about 15-20mins of FLAWLESS playback in VLC to go by so far, but I think I may have cracked it.

Thanks for sharing your findings about the VLC ffdshow AAC decoder. The abrupt changes in audio level are still a problem with all the latest versions of VLC (2.0.7).

Following your lead, I found from the VideoLan website that VLC uses the Nero FAAD2 2.7 version of the AAC audio decoder. Searching the web for “ff_libfaad2.dll” I found a website that had a compiled Nero 2.7 version (unfortunately I cannot post a link - contact me).

The file will be downloaded as “ff_libfaad2.dll”. Scan the file for viruses before doing anything with it. Rename the downloaded file as “libfaad_plugin.dll”.

The VLC AAC codec to be replaced is:-
“C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\plugins\codec\libfaad_plugin.dll” or
“C:\Program Files (x86)\VideoLAN\VLC\plugins\codec\libfaad_plugin.dll”

Rename the existing file “libfaad_plugin.bak”, so that it can be reinstated if required, and copy the downloaded “libfaad_plugin.dll” into the same VLC folder.

The renamed downloaded file works in 32-bit and 64-bit versions of VLC. Problem solved!