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More => Old Versions => JRiver Media Center 26 for Windows => Topic started by: haggis999 on April 26, 2020, 02:37:16 pm
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I have been using MakeMKV for several years to rip my Blu-rays and a few of my DVDs, but hit a problem today I have never seen before. A DVD rip was completed without any error and the resulting MKV plays fine on my primary Dell workstation. However, when I tried to play it on an OLED TV via my HTPC the picture was totally unsynchronised and kept flashing uncontrollably. Both PCs are running MC 26 under Windows 10.
Previously ripped DVDs and Blu-rays continue to run fine on this HTPC and TV, so I'm struggling to work out the cause of this unexpected problem. Any suggestions would be much appreciated.
I don't know if this is an MC or an MakeMKV issue, so will also ask this question on the MakeMKV forum.
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More details will be useful ... playing using RO Standard or RO HQ? ... video is HD or 4K? ... what video card you are using? ... what’s the frame rate of the movie 23.976 or 60?
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It is a DVD, so it is more likely to be SD and have some weird interlacing issue or something.
What is the DVD? Search for known issues with it online, or specifically wrt MakeMKV.
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Run an MD5 checksum on both files. The file could have been corrupted when copying from one computer to the other. If the checksums are different, there's your problem. I've seen that happen.
And I assume when you say "play it on an OLED TV" you are NOT trying to play it via DLNA, and are instead just playing it normally with the HTPC displaying it through the HDMI output. Is the TV even processing the audio, or is the audio intercepted by your receiver because the HDMI cable goes from the HTPC to a receiver before going to the TV?
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More details will be useful ... playing using RO Standard or RO HQ? ... video is HD or 4K? ... what video card you are using? ... what’s the frame rate of the movie 23.976 or 60?
It's a DVD, so it's HD. My HTPC is an Intel NUC 8i3CYSM with integrated Radeon 540 graphics. I'm using RO Standard in MC. I'm sure I will find it eventually, but at the moment I don't know where to find the frame rate.
EDIT: The frame rate is 29.97 fps.
EDIT 2: I really meant to say "It's a DVD, so it's SD" but brain failure intervened...
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It is a DVD, so it is more likely to be SD and have some weird interlacing issue or something.
What is the DVD? Search for known issues with it online, or specifically wrt MakeMKV.
Hi Roderick,
It's a 1996 Decca DVD of Rossini's opera La Cenerentola, with Cecilia Bartoli and Houston Grand Opera. A Google search failed to find any known issues.
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Run an MD5 checksum on both files. The file could have been corrupted when copying from one computer to the other. If the checksums are different, there's your problem. I've seen that happen.
And I assume when you say "play it on an OLED TV" you are NOT trying to play it via DLNA, and are instead just playing it normally with the HTPC displaying it through the HDMI output. Is the TV even processing the audio, or is the audio intercepted by your receiver because the HDMI cable goes from the HTPC to a receiver before going to the TV?
Both PCs are playing the same MKV file, which is stored on a NAS.
I am indeed just using the TV as a display for the HTPC, via an HDMI connection. The HDMI passthrough on my AV amp is faulty so I'm also using the TV to handle the audio (which is then fed to the AV amp via an optical connection). However, the audio works fine. I only have a problem with the video.
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It's a DVD, so it's HD.
DVDs are SD. The DVD standard does not support HD. For HD, it would have to be a BluRay or HD-DVD disc. Since you confirmed the framerate as 29.97, it's a Standard Definition DVD in NTSC format.
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Try switching to Red October HQ on the HTPC, just as a test. That will use MadVR, so the rendering path will be totally different.
You can select the "Best Performance" quality setting.
See if that makes a difference.
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DVDs are SD. The DVD standard does not support HD. For HD, it would have to be a BluRay or HD-DVD disc. Since you confirmed the framerate as 29.97, it's a Standard Definition DVD in NTSC format.
Sorry, my brain was not in synch with my fingers when typing that post :(
It is of course in SD.
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No worries. Definitely try the madvr rendering. If they're playing the same file, the issue is something with the HTPC.
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Try switching to Red October HQ on the HTPC, just as a test. That will use MadVR, so the rendering path will be totally different.
You can select the "Best Performance" quality setting.
See if that makes a difference.
ROHQ with the 'Best Performance' setting makes no difference. The video is still a total mess.
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I have now found that turning off MC's option 'Hardware accelerate video decoding when possible' fixes this video problem on my HTPC.
No other MKV file has had an issue with that setting, so it's all rather puzzling. That setting is also turned on on my other PC and has never caused problem, though it obviously has different hardware.
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Ah yes. That same thing happened to me, so I should have thought of it.
You say you've been ripping and playing discs for years, but MC26 is not years old. That machine has been upgraded. At some point in the past, the meaning/benefit of that "hardware accelerate" reversed. In an older version of MC, it was necessary for proper performance on my HTPC. With MC26, I had to turn it off. So it doesn't surprise me your machine is behaving better with it off than on.
Specifically for me, it was making Lanczos scaling in MadVR take far longer than it had before. So turning off that option accelerated the performance, and enabling it had the opposite effect.
If you examine your file with mediainfo, you will probably find it differs in some other way (interlacing, field order?), and that would explain the different behavior between files.
As I've said before, that option should come with a giant warning label. :)
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It's a 1996 Decca DVD of Rossini's opera La Cenerentola, with Cecilia Bartoli and Houston Grand Opera.
Also, it's a music video, and an opera at that. Music videos are notorious for not quite following normal standards. My understanding is that often the audio is of a higher quality or slightly different format, and that impacts playback, usually of the video, because of loading on the hardware to play the audio stream... or something like that.
The problem disappearing when you turn off Hardware Acceleration is consistent with that. But I'll let someone who knows a lot more about audio and video formats elaborate, because I can't. ;)
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Ah yes. That same thing happened to me, so I should have thought of it.
You say you've been ripping and playing discs for years, but MC26 is not years old. That machine has been upgraded. At some point in the past, the meaning/benefit of that "hardware accelerate" reversed. In an older version of MC, it was necessary for proper performance on my HTPC. With MC26, I had to turn it off. So it doesn't surprise me your machine is behaving better with it off than on.
Specifically for me, it was making Lanczos scaling in MadVR take far longer than it had before. So turning off that option accelerated the performance, and enabling it had the opposite effect.
If you examine your file with mediainfo, you will probably find it differs in some other way (interlacing, field order?), and that would explain the different behavior between files.
As I've said before, that option should come with a giant warning label. :)
I always used the 'Hardware accelerate video decoding when possible' setting through many different versions of MC on my Dell workstation, as I assumed MC would then make better use of the graphics card in what is now a rather old computer. The Intel NUC HTPC is a much newer machine and I simply copied the MC settings used on the Dell. The HTPC does not have a discrete graphics card, which is another possible explanation for it being unable to cope with this problematic DVD.
Most of the stuff in the attached MediaInfo report is over my head. I've tried comparing it with MediaInfo data for other DVD rips but suspect that many of the differences I saw were just because they were PAL, rather than NTSC.
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Well, that report is only for one file, and doesn't have info for another file that plays fine, but I can see that one is interlaced. You could be having issues with the deinterlacing.
There's also a FLAC audio track embedded. How did that get there?
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Well, that report is only for one file, and doesn't have info for another file that plays fine, but I can see that one is interlaced. You could be having issues with the deinterlacing.
There's also a FLAC audio track embedded. How did that get there?
I don't have another NTSC DVD rip for comparison purposes but have attached a PAL DVD rip that plays without any issues.
All my rips created using MakeMKV have lossless audio tracks in FLAC format.
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I don't have another NTSC DVD rip for comparison purposes but have attached a PAL DVD rip that plays without any issues.
All my rips created using MakeMKV have lossless audio tracks in FLAC format.
That's because you've change the MakeMKV profile to convert the audio tracks to FLAC.
FLAC does not exist on DVDs. It's not part of the standard. By contrast, look at the Mediainfo report for the Enigma disc you just sent: the audio track is in AC3 format, which is the standard format on DVDs.
One thing you could try... Go into MakeMKV, and go to the Advanced tab in preferences. Now where it says "Default Profile" try selecting "Default". (You probably currently have it set to flac).
Selecting the default profile will ensure that MakeMKV rips the audio and video tracks without modifying them, you'll get the exact audio track as it was on the disc.
Select that, re-rip the disc, (you'll see the audio will now be AC3) and try playing it again on your HTPC with the old hardware accelerate setting and see if anything changes.
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That's because you've change the MakeMKV profile to convert the audio tracks to FLAC.
It's approaching midnight here in the UK, so I'll check out your suggestion tomorrow :)
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That's because you've change the MakeMKV profile to convert the audio tracks to FLAC.
FLAC does not exist on DVDs. It's not part of the standard. By contrast, look at the Mediainfo report for the Enigma disc you just sent: the audio track is in AC3 format, which is the standard format on DVDs.
The MediaInfo reports for both La Cenerentola and Enigma show that the 5.1 audio track is in AC3 format. It's only the stereo track on the La Cenerentola DVD that was converted to FLAC. However, I only noticed this after running the test you recommended (see below).
One thing you could try... Go into MakeMKV, and go to the Advanced tab in preferences. Now where it says "Default Profile" try selecting "Default". (You probably currently have it set to flac).
Selecting the default profile will ensure that MakeMKV rips the audio and video tracks without modifying them, you'll get the exact audio track as it was on the disc.
Select that, re-rip the disc, (you'll see the audio will now be AC3) and try playing it again on your HTPC with the old hardware accelerate setting and see if anything changes.
I re-ripped the La Cenerentola DVD using MakeMKV's default setting for audio but it made no difference. The resulting MKV file still failed to run properly when hardware acceleration was enabled on my HTPC. It only took a couple of minutes to find that this was because this new rip was just the same as my first rip. In both cases, MakeMKV has chosen to leave the 5.1 AC3 track unchanged but converted the LPCM stereo track to FLAC.
All my tests were done using the AC3 audio track. I've just confirmed that the video problem is still present when the FLAC stereo track is selected.
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Can you take a screen shot of what you mean by problematic playback ... also if you running RO HQ, press curl+J to bring MadVR stats at send a screenshot of that too
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Can you take a screen shot of what you mean by problematic playback ... also if you running RO HQ, press curl+J to bring MadVR stats at send a screenshot of that too
When I get this problem, all I see is a distorted version of the lower half of the image. The attached PDF provides an example, though the image is often much more distorted than this.
I'm normally running in RO Standard mode, so haven't provided any MadVR stats.
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Just to be clear … this only happens on your HTPC … while playing on workstation is perfect
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Just to be clear … this only happens on your HTPC … while playing on workstation is perfect
Yes, that's correct and it only happens on the HTPC if hardware acceleration is enabled.
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If things play fine with hardware acceleration off, just leave it off. I had to do that on a machine with MC26, as I said.
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If things play fine with hardware acceleration off, just leave it off. I had to do that on a machine with MC26, as I said.
I'm quite happy with that solution. Finding out why it fails with hardware acceleration enabled is simply a matter of curiosity, though I'm not very optimistic that such information will ever be forthcoming. I can live with that.
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You already have it. As I said earlier, a while back they changed how that option operates. Some systems that used to require it ON now require it OFF. Or the converse could happen. This happened contemporaneously with the shift from DiretX to OpenGL if I recall.
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Must be something to do with Intel hardware decoding (or the way MC is using it) ... on my 1070 hardware decoding works fine
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You already have it. As I said earlier, a while back they changed how that option operates. Some systems that used to require it ON now require it OFF. Or the converse could happen. This happened contemporaneously with the shift from DiretX to OpenGL if I recall.
If the explanation was really that simple, then surely some of my previous rips would now be failing in the same way?
The fact that, so far, it is only this one rip that is displaying the problem suggests to me that it's more likely there is something unusual about the La Cenerentola DVD. Supporting that thought is that MakeMKV had to spend several minutes unravelling a very complicated DVD structure before it could fully open that disc. I've never seen MakeMKV do that before.
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This happened contemporaneously with the shift from DiretX to OpenGL if I recall.
Video Playback and Theater View are not related (and incidentally, Theater View still uses DirectX on Windows). If you want to rule out any Theater View influence, just try playing from Standard View instead (even if only as a test).
Hardware Accelerated decoding can sometimes spuriously fail for various reasons. Maybe this specific video uses some specifically weird encoding that trips up the hardware. Maybe the driver is having issues. On Intel GPUs with older hardware the latter is unfortunately not too uncommon. With access to the hardware and the specific file I may be able to diagnose it somewhat, but even then there is a chance that everything looks alright but just doesn't decode properly.
What I would generally recommend is to update the graphics drivers. Intel just this week released a way to update drivers on OEM machines as well, which should help with that on a variety of otherwise "locked" systems, which is really good news.