Fall Back Audio Track (Do I really need to transcode?)

G'day All,

Long time reader, first time poster, and a pro license holder, I truly believe in funding great work. Keep up the great job all.

I suppose I'll quickly introduce myself, I'm a communications engineer that specializes in rapidly deployed meshed computer networks. Fun stuff. About a year ago I decided to delve into the world of video encoding. I run Serviio on my Main PC at home which is hooked into a Gigabit Switch supplying awesomeness to the rest of my house via Cat 5 Ethernet including two Samsung UA48H6400's. The switch also supplies an AC WiFi Access point giving WiFi network access to my laptop (when it's not wired up in the office) plus two HTC Phones and a Tablet. I've also encoded to MKV (uncompressed) my entire DVD collection onto my MainPC and am currently working on my Blu-Ray collection. Talking to the outside world is via a Telco ADSL Modem that does nothing other than route and firewall my LAN to the Inter-WAN. Oh, I also have another 5MHz MIMO WiFi directional dish on my roof shooting across the suburb to my mates place about a mile (1.6km) away where he has a couple of Samsung E Series TV's and numerous tablets/phones hanging off his router/switch/WiFi AP. We're averaging 150MBps on that . So it's a pretty decent size home network.
I also have a QNAP TS-451 in the post as we speak loaded with 24TB of WD Red, and when that bad boy arrives I'm going to be pushing Serviio duties onto that bad boy so I can free up resources on the main PC so my wife can play SWTOR. Happy Wife = Happy Life.

Okay, onto the snag I've hit now that I've delved into the world of blu-ray... Hold onto your butts.

I've encoded to MKV once again un-compressed (TLOTR - Fellowship of the ring extended edition Pt1&2 muxed together take up a staggering 56GB! Oh YES!). When I encode, depending on the option I will always take the PCM option, and either DTS-HD/DTS or Dolby TrueHD/AC3. In both DTS and Dolby scenarios, The higher definition audio contains the default MKV flag. However the original lower bit-rate audio stream does exist. The issue that I am having is with TrueHD, which I understand is not necessarily supported by DLNA. I understand that by modifying the profile.xml I can add a string to transcode to AC3 (Std Dolby) which is cool, but the audio stream ALREADY EXISTS in the MKV container as a secondary audio stream.

So Question: Is there a way on my Samsung H series profiles I can add a switch to use the redundant ac3 audio stream native to the MKV and drop the TrueHD audio? Or must I transcode? <--Sad Face.

Also the other issue I am having is thumbnails as they appear on the TV. I try my best to use the most standard naming convention possible for movies but that doesn't stop the occasional random image coming up. For example, tonight "D:\Movies\Fantasy\The Hobbit - The Desolation of Smoag.mkv" showed a thumbnail for a movie called "Fantasy" As did many other movies in that folder. My wife looked that up on IMDB.com that it turned out to be a Gay Porno. Not that I have anything against that, I just don't want my kids exposed to that side of the internet. T'was an awkward moment that saw my 5 year old Daughter and 11 year old Son rapidly ejected from the living room whilst I un-screwed (I wanted to use a different word) the situation. Is there a way that I can "update" these manually? Or am I missing something in what I assumed was a pretty standard naming convention.

Please forgive my noobish questions, I've been trolling around for a couple of nights for answers but alas I've come up empty handed, so I thought I'd just ask the masters directly.
I hope my post has been a fun read.

Cheers Lads/Lad-ettes and "other" (joke from work).

-Milkshake

[DenyAll]

Hi Milkshake. Welcome to the forum.

I was able to emulate the "Fantasy" issue. Its a weird one with an easy fix. I was able to fix this by adding the year of the movie to the filename - in this case renaming the file to "The Hobbit - The Desolation of Smaug (2013).mkv" does the trick (although not relevant to the issue, note the spelling of "Smaug"). @ zip - may be something to look into (when you have spare time )

wrt selecting the secondary audio stream:

I assume you are able to stream the file natively (without transcoding) at the moment, and that its just that the audio won't play?? If that is the case the best thing to do is either find the method to select a different audio stream (if played natively Serviio will be pushing all audio streams to the TV) using the remote. I haven't got a Samsung but there should be a way to do this on the TV. This is from the web, so not sure if it's accurate - After hitting play, click the Tools button. A popup should appear in the lower left. Arrow over to audio (highlight in green) and enter. A menu with the different audio tracks should come up and you can choose the right one

If its not possible to select the audio track, then the only other thing I can think of is to remux the file and push the AC-3 stream to be the first and default audio stream. This should allow it to be played on the TV while still retaining the other audio tracks for those devices that support them. Look at the MKVMerge tool to assist doing this.

If your file is being transcoded then you need to look at why (the Samsung H profile will only transcode MKV's if the H264 profile level is over 4.2). If this is the case then you are going to have issues - while your current PC may be able to transcode these, the QNAP won't - it won't have the grunt.

G'day DenyAll,

Not going to lie, I'm pretty embarrassed about not checking the audio stream through the TV, and sure enough, changing to "Language 2" in the tools menu fixed the issue and switched me to AC3 Dolby 5.1 which saw my Star Trek Orchestral intro singing through my surround system. Very Happy Now.

Also, for the record, I spelt "Smaug" right on the mkv, just not in my post. Whoops

I'll go through and add the year to my mkv's and see if that helps. I know I have to do that for TV shows that are re-makes (Dr Who, Battle Star, The Flash etc) or they will display the original series but I never thought to try it on the movies, especially unique movies. Cheers for checking that out for me, greatly appreciated

This whole learning the world of video encoding has been like drinking from a fire hydrant!

-Milkshake

[atc98092]

Milkshake, your network sounds very similar to mine, except for the link to your friend. My son-in-law wants to run Cat5 from my house to his (about 1/2 mile, but can't see each other) because I have 50Mbps high quality DSL, and he has a 20Mbps connection that constantly retrains. I've explained the length restrictions of Ethernet, but I'm not sure he believes me!

For file naming, it's tough to beat FileBot (http://www.filebot.net). Like Denyall says, adding the year can make a huge difference in metadata download accuracy. If you ever rip TV episodes, accurate file naming is critical for correct metadata retrieval. I had a heck of a time getting Hawaii 5-0 to download correctly, since there's two versions of the same show.

I was also going to suggest the audio selection menu on the TV. With my Samsung devices, even if I select the HD audio it only outputs the lossy version. Even the Blu-Ray player, which should support the HD audio downgrades to standard DD or DTS.

If you are using MakeMKV (http://www.makemkv.com) for your ripping, you can select which audio track you want. By default it doesn't even select the HD audio track, so if you want it you have to add it manually.

The HD audio will pass through DLNA, but the player needs to support it. While I've used only a few brands, I've found Sony BD players that will play the HD audio. My Yamaha receiver shows on the screen what audio codec is being used, and my Samsung never plays anything higher than standard DD or DTS. Even when watching something on Netflix that should be DD+ (which the Roku does pass) the Samsung still only shows DD.

He he, yea long distance shots are easy, look up a company called ubiquity. The engineering team looks frightfully like the motirolla engineering team from the 90's but their products are actually affordable. I'm using their Mimo 18dBi 2.4Ghz dish. Only issue if you want to link disparate networks with their own dhcp and internet gateway, you will need to add a static route at each router and segregate the lan subnets. You will also need to add a multicast route for dlna with the subscriber end downstream. Definitely a 100m limitation on cat5. I've field tested that one. We can stream hd in both directions simultaneously over our link so it's good to go.

The other option is for zip to add multi-homeing into serviio .

Mind you with vdsl speeds like you have quoted, providing your upstream is greater than 5mbps, you shouldn't have an issue either wan streaming or creating a vpn. (i may be no good with encodes, but networks are my bi**h).

Yea makeMkv is how I'm ripping. I select both streams in the hope of "one day" lol.

On a side note, my subtitles aren't working since I switched from my pc to my qnap. Thoughts anyone? I've got the v1.5 x86 qpkg version.

[DenyAll]

On a side note, my subtitles aren't working since I switched from my pc to my qnap.

Maybe related?: viewtopic.php?f=14&t=5324&p=98223

If you are burning-in subtitles I doubt the qnap will have the grunt.

I'm honestly not sure if I'm "Burning In" Sub-titles... I'm a bit fuzzy on the terminology. I know when I rip I select the relevant English sub-titles.

I've just enabled burned in sub-titles "only when required". We'll see how we got. I've got a TS-451, and while I know it's not the most powerful out there, at least it's an Intel.

Wait and see I guess :-S