Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Installing VLC Media Player voids your speaker warranty

en.community.dell.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 224 posts

Re: Installing VLC Media Player voids your speaker warranty

#141

Post by fnordfnordfnord »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #73
guard-of-terra wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then one should figure out why nobody needed this feature. I'm no expert but maybe it's actually possible to create speaker that doesn't go bad. (I could code the protection into the sound driver in half a day probably)

> I'm no expert but maybe it's actually possible to create speaker that doesn't go bad. Of course it is, but nobody wants to do that; it's not profitable. * sigh * . I sometimes wonder how difficult would it be to create, say, a brand of kettles with lifetime warranty, designed to last 50+ years instead of 50+ weeks the ones we have do. How hard would it be to sell them and to what ends would the competition go to st…

Dell isn't winning much on this. The service calls and now the reputation hit cost them more than they could make repairing laptops.

Re: Installing VLC Media Player voids your speaker warranty

#142

Post by userbinator »

mansr wrote: post #32

When the Samsung ARM Chromebook came out, people quickly found that careless tinkering with alsamixer caused the speakers to overheat and melt the case as a result of being driven with a high DC current. A driver update blocked the control causing the damaging signal routing.

They didn't bother to put $0.001 DC blocking capacitors on the DAC outputs? This isn't a "bug in the kernel" or any software, it's a clear hardware flaw.

Re: Installing VLC Media Player voids your speaker warranty

#143

Post by fnordfnordfnord »

thelukester wrote: post #128
humbledrone wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's exactly as easy to decrease VLC's audio level back to normal as it is to increase it. Anyway if you don't like it remembering the last audio level, go to Tools > Preferences > Audio, check the "Always reset audio start level to" box, and set it to 100%. Voila!

No, VLC should remember the last audio level, just not when it's over 100%. If I leave it at 50%. On next restart it should be 50%. If I'm watching a movie and finish on 200%, on next restart it should be 100%. Clipping sucks. VLC shouldn't remember these options unless the user changes an optional setting.

Jeez, start VLC with an alias if it bothers you that much.

Re: Installing VLC Media Player voids your speaker warranty

#144

Post by chengiz »

jbk wrote: post #15

As the main developer of VLC, we know about this story since a long time, and this is just Dell putting crap components on their machine and blaming others. Any discussion was impossible with them. So let me explain a bit... In this case, VLC just uses the Windows APIs (DirectSound), and sends signed integers of 16bits (s16) to the Windows Kernel. VLC allows amplification of the INPUT above the sound that was decoded…

> The issue here is that Dell sound cards output power (that can be approached by a factor of the quadratic of the amplitude) that Dell speakers cannot handle. Simply said, the sound card outputs at max 10W, and the speakers only can take 6W in, and neither their BIOS or drivers block this.

In other words, due to increase in amplitude, increasing volume over 100% can break the hardware? I am not trying to blame VLC, just that your statement "At worse, this will reduce the dynamics and saturate a lot, but this is not going to break your hardware" sounds a bit fallacious in the context of your own explanation.

Re: Installing VLC Media Player voids your speaker warranty

#145

Post by userbinator »

__david__ wrote: post #75

So basically, Dell's crappy speaker/amp design can't handle square waves at full volume. I suppose you shouldn't listen to loud chip-tunes either, then.

This is particularly amusing to me, as someone who regularly enjoys more... extreme genres of music that features lots of distortion and hard clipping. My no-name cheap Chinese speakers and headphones haven't died because of it, in fact my ears probably have less tolerance than the hardware.

Re: Installing VLC Media Player voids your speaker warranty

#146

Post by dfc »

thelukester wrote: post #128
humbledrone wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's exactly as easy to decrease VLC's audio level back to normal as it is to increase it. Anyway if you don't like it remembering the last audio level, go to Tools > Preferences > Audio, check the "Always reset audio start level to" box, and set it to 100%. Voila!

No, VLC should remember the last audio level, just not when it's over 100%. If I leave it at 50%. On next restart it should be 50%. If I'm watching a movie and finish on 200%, on next restart it should be 100%. Clipping sucks. VLC shouldn't remember these options unless the user changes an optional setting.

I have to be honest, setting "do not remember audio" sounds like a decent compromise between not getting anything that you want and getting exactly what you want. It is especially appealing since you get VLC and this compromise solution for free. However if you are still not satisfied:

  $ git clone git://git.videolan.org/vlc.git
  $ cd vlc
  $ ack-grep -r  resetVolumeCheckbox ./
  $ emacs modules/gui/qt4/components/simple_preferences.cpp 
  $ git format-patch -o patches origin
  $ git send-email --to vlc-devel@videolan.org patches

Re: Installing VLC Media Player voids your speaker warranty

#147

Post by tmoertel »

lutusp wrote: post #133
tmoertel wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... the resulting clipped waveform carries a lot more energy than an unclipped one. Is this claim actually true? My understanding is that if you take a waveform and clip it, the resulting waveform actually carries less energy (think of the corresponding integral), but more of that energy is pushed into the higher frequencies. It's this – the unexpectedly large amount of high-frequency energy – that kills speakers b…

>> ... the resulting clipped waveform carries a lot more energy than an unclipped one. > Is this claim actually true? Yes, it is -- but it depends on how we define "clipped". > My understanding is that if you take a waveform and clip it, the resulting waveform actually carries less energy (think of the corresponding integral) Only if the clipping reduces the peak value. If you compare a sinewave with a peak value of…

> Only if the clipping reduces the peak value...

I don't know of any widely used definition of "clipping", nor any definition that fits the context of this discussion, that allows for a signal's peak value not to be reduced. It's called clipping because the extreme values look to have been clipped away, as if by scissors. The parts that have been clipped away contain energy, don't they? So won't the clipped signal will carry less energy than the original?

When you take a sine wave of peak value 1 and clip it, what you get is not a square wave with a peak value of 1. Rather, you get a peak-truncated sine wave in which values in excess of the clipping threshold V are replaced with the clipping threshold. There's less power in this clipped sine wave than in the original because min(V, |sin t|) t| for all t.

Re: Installing VLC Media Player voids your speaker warranty

#148

Post by fnordfnordfnord »

userbinator wrote: post #142
mansr wrote: post #32

When the Samsung ARM Chromebook came out, people quickly found that careless tinkering with alsamixer caused the speakers to overheat and melt the case as a result of being driven with a high DC current. A driver update blocked the control causing the damaging signal routing.

They didn't bother to put $0.001 DC blocking capacitors on the DAC outputs? This isn't a "bug in the kernel" or any software, it's a clear hardware flaw.

Be fair, those caps are easily two or three times that much.

Re: Installing VLC Media Player voids your speaker warranty

#149

Post by idProQuo »

jbk wrote: post #15

As the main developer of VLC, we know about this story since a long time, and this is just Dell putting crap components on their machine and blaming others. Any discussion was impossible with them. So let me explain a bit... In this case, VLC just uses the Windows APIs (DirectSound), and sends signed integers of 16bits (s16) to the Windows Kernel. VLC allows amplification of the INPUT above the sound that was decoded…

Just from this comment, it seems like you guys have a pretty interesting problem domain. I'm going to take a look at the VLC repo and see if there's anything I can contribute, thanks for getting me interested!
Post reply on HN