Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Streamz]

A bit of follow-up on this thread: http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=64183.0

I'm experiencing very poor sound quality with movies. 700MB DVDrip's for example, but also HD TV recordings sound muffled and closed in.
I'm using JRiver (obviously), but only the DLNA server for streaming the movies to Sumsung LCD TV. To get it working all the time, I had to use MPEG2 conversion (high bandwidth).   

To rule out the sound quality of the built in speakers in the TV (which are rubbish naturally), I connected the TV with an optical cable to a high quality DAC. From there to amp and speakers. It sounds awful.
To test the video material, I played the videos using MPC-Home Cinema through the Intel audio chip (USW15 chipset) on the same compur, headphone out to the same amp and speakers. Much, much better.

So, what is happening? Things I can think of:
- TV's audio DAC is crap -> bad quality via TV's speakers
- TV's audio DAC is not bypassed when using digital optical out -> crap out to the amp and speakers
- conversion by JRiver/FFMPEG is not working for good quality audio.
- conversion is done right, but again TV's DAC is crap.

The thing is, normal (HD) digital TV broadcast sound good. So it can't be the DAC. This leaves the conversion part.

Anyone any ideas on how to improve? The DLNA functionality in the TV works fine, so I'm not keen on changing this.
Last remark: I cannot play movies with JRiver natively. Missing codecs/filters I guess?   

[JimH]

Last remark: I cannot play movies with JRiver natively. Missing codecs/filters I guess?   

Please try to solve this first.

[Streamz]

So this can be the issue?

In some previous attempts to have movies working, I've installed the CCCP pack. deinstalled afterwards, as this wouldn't solve my issue anyway. But also with that pack I could play movies. Maybe I'm missing something, but what do I have to do to get JRiver to play movies?

<edit> The message I get is: "Media Center encountered errors while trying to play the last several files. Please make sure that the path in your media points to the right location."

But the files are there. And JRiver is even showing the still / preview or how you will call it. But only at .MOV files. Not the .AVI's, nothing to see there.
Both types will not play.

[JimH]

What's the full version of the MC you are running?

[Streamz]

MC 16.0.128

[JimH]

16.0.145 is at the top of the MC16 board.

[Streamz]

Ok, that helps. At least for the movie playing part, I'll do some testing on sound quality now.

[Streamz]

Ok, so no improvement. Sound quality is terrible. I've let the same movie been played 2 times at the same time by MC, through DLNA and native. So no MPC-HC this time.
Headphone out is good, through DLNA and conversion by JRiver is like listening to a defect radio of the 50's.
 
It seems somewhere in the conversion something is wrong?

[bob]

Ok, so no improvement. Sound quality is terrible. I've let the same movie been played 2 times at the same time by MC, through DLNA and native. So no MPC-HC this time.
Headphone out is good, through DLNA and conversion by JRiver is like listening to a defect radio of the 50's.
 
It seems somewhere in the conversion something is wrong?

Can you use the MPEG2/DVD conversion instead of mpeg2 high bandwidth?

If not, you could always tweak the values in the ffmpeg.xml file...

[Streamz]

Well, it seems that the MPEG2/DVD options should work. It wants to start the movie, but it's loading continuously and the CPU usage is at max. Trying another, smaller video screws up the system even more, as I see now that a second ffmpeg process is started, alongside the first session (which didn't stop).

It seems that ffmpeg puts a huge load on the cpu.

What do you mean with tweaking the values in ffmpeg?


 

[Streamz]

It's getting weird now. I selected the MPEG2/DVD option, this time with "MPEG vieo mimetype override" checked. Now the video works, good quality and I see that ffmpeg is not started up. After 5 minutes the video freezes and now skippes to the next video. Again an .avi DVDrip, plays and after a minute it freezes, skips to the next video and now ffmpeg starts up.

I stop the video (via the remote control of the TV, so stopped the DLNA client on the TV) and see that the fmpeg process is again not stopped.

This should work. But how?

<edit> when I set conversion to "never convert" it's working without issues. So the DLNA server works.
<edit 2> checked many other movies, and there now playing without conversion. Apart from some older .mov clips I've made with a photocamera. Movie part works, audio codec is not supported.
Still, I have to have JRiver set to "never convert" otherwise at some point it will mess up video streaming.

It seems the .145 update really helped in getting movies to play natively. Not only in JRiver, but also for DLNA serving.  Thanks!

[bob]

DLNA renderers only are required to support mpeg2 video to be meet the standard. Most support other formats as well. The mimetype override lies to the renderer and says that everything is what you specify in the override fileds even though it could be something totally different. The reason this is effective for some devices is that they filter on the DLNA and mimetype flags but don't actually use that information for playing the file and they appear to have generic playback that can play a bunch of formats even though they don't claim to be able to (it wouldn't surprise me if they were actually running VLC for playback, I know for certain that at least some DLNA devices that are linux based do).

The "convert when necessary flag" is going to convert everything that isn't mpeg2 to whatever you select in the conversion options.
(though it is more tuned for PS3 and Xbox 360 and won't convert formats they can natively play since Sony and MS are very specific about what they can play).

ffmpeg converting to mpeg2/DVD requires most of a full core on a core2 machine running at 2.4 ghz. A P4 is probably not going to be able to keep up in real time.

At some point we hope to replace ffmpeg with RO for transcoding which would give us greater flexibility and control over the encoding process.