Page 1 of 1

Tool to find out how Serviio will treat a file?

PostPosted: Wed Jan 14, 2015 9:49 am
by cocowalla
I sometimes have trouble playing some videos through Serviio on my Samsung F6400 TV; for example, features like 'pause', 'fast forward' etc don't work, subtitles are not displayed etc.

When this happens it's a real pain to try and figure out what Serviio is doing with these files. Is it transcoding them? If so, using what profile? What rules were matched to use that profile? etc

Is there some sort of command line utility that takes in a file, looks at the configured Serviio profiles and will tell me how Serviio will treat that file?

Re: Tool to find out how Serviio will treat a file?

PostPosted: Wed Jan 14, 2015 1:35 pm
by atc98092
I know of no such utility. Interesting idea...

It mostly sounds like your files are being transcoded. One way to tell is to start playing a video, then checking your Serviio PC and see if FFMPEG is running. By default it runs as a background user, so in Windows you have to tell it you want to see processes from all users. Strange that pause doesn't work, but FF and subtitles are generally not available if a file is transcoded.

If you enable detailed logging, you can see which profile is being used for your TV. Remember that detailed logs can get huge, so don't leave detailed logging enabled all the time.

Re: Tool to find out how Serviio will treat a file?

PostPosted: Wed Jan 14, 2015 3:46 pm
by cocowalla
atc98092 wrote:I know of no such utility. Interesting idea...

It mostly sounds like your files are being transcoded. One way to tell is to start playing a video, then checking your Serviio PC and see if FFMPEG is running. By default it runs as a background user, so in Windows you have to tell it you want to see processes from all users. Strange that pause doesn't work, but FF and subtitles are generally not available if a file is transcoded.

If you enable detailed logging, you can see which profile is being used for your TV. Remember that detailed logs can get huge, so don't leave detailed logging enabled all the time.


This is basically what I'm doing now. But it's a pain having to switch extra logging on, restart the service, try to play the video on a TV on a different floor, trawl through the logs, wonder which rules are being matched for a profile to be used, maybe figure it from the masses of log output if I'm lucky, play around with the profiles, turn the extra logging off, restart the service, try to play the video on a TV on a different floor, FAIL, rinse and repeat!

A simple command line tool that would tell me which profile is being selected and why would be most welcome!

Re: Tool to find out how Serviio will treat a file?

PostPosted: Wed Jan 14, 2015 9:13 pm
by jhb50
The profile used by each device is set/defined in the console/status tab.
Use mediainfo or ffmpeg to get the files codecs and then look at the profile to see what transcoding is applied to them.
Transcoding can be verified by looking at the transcoding directory as defined in the console delivery/transcoding tab.
You can copy the transcoded file and change the type to mpg and play it with any pc player to verify it.
Its really quite simple and no log is required.