Struggles with Sony BP (BDP-S470)

I've been struggling with this for week. One of my problems was that versions 0.5.1 and 0.5.2 both fail to load properly on my Snow Leopard (10.5.6) 64 bit iMac, so I'm currently using 0.5.0. All of my previous M4P files play fine but any newly created files with HandBreak 0.9.5 would fail to load indicating the file was corrupt or unsupported. checking them with "ffmpeg -i" would not show any signifant difference and all changes in the conversion process in HB resulted in the same problem. Last night, I finally found a copy of HB 0.9.4 and it worked perfectly.

Is there something I can do to get newer versions of Serviio to load? They currently start to load and it locks up requiring a force quit. I tried loading it as 32bit and even using Rhapsody with no success. Is there something I can to to HB 0.9.5 to get it to convert properly?

Thanks!

LasVegas

[Illico]

I've been struggling with this for week. One of my problems was that versions 0.5.1 and 0.5.2 both fail to load properly on my Snow Leopard (10.5.6) 64 bit iMac, so I'm currently using 0.5.0.

Sorry could not help you for that.

All of my previous M4P files play fine but any newly created files with HandBreak 0.9.5 would fail to load indicating the file was corrupt or unsupported.

The video encoding settings are probably changed, cause Sony device to failed.

checking them with "ffmpeg -i" would not show any significant difference and all changes in the conversion process in HB resulted in the same problem. Last night, I finally found a copy of HB 0.9.4 and it worked perfectly.

With "ffmpeg -i" or MediaInfo result you could sometime have the encoding settings used.
Compare your two version result (0.9.5 vs 0.9.4).

Thank-you. That put me on the right track. Comparing the same movie, converted with each version, shows that the newer version misreads the framerate of the original movie. With HandBreak 0.9.4, the movie was correctly using 23.976 but was incorrectly set in the metadata as double that.

  Code:

Seems stream 0 codec frame rate differs from container frame rate: 47.95 (48000/1001) -> 23.98 (48000/2002)

...although this seems to be interpreted properly by Serviio. HB 0.9.5 set the framerate completely wrong to 90,000!

  Code:

Seems stream 0 codec frame rate differs from container frame rate: 180000.00 (180000/1) -> 90000.00 (180000/2)

...with the same error.

When I manually set the framerate in 0.9.5 to 23.976, the MP4 file translated properly. I guess I should submit a bug report to Handbreak...

Thanks again,

LasVegas

I sent a bug report to Handspring and received the following reply:

  Code:

Whatever you are using to read the metadata is buggy as are your dlna servers. They are reading a field in the h.264 stream that is designated as a "timebase" and interpreting it incorrectly as fps. This is a fairly common problem. HandBrake has always generated variable frame rate output when "Same as source" is selected for the framerate. But prior to 0.9.5, we were not designating that the content was vfr (because x264 didn't support it yet). In HandBrake 0.9.5, we started correctly setting the timebase for variable framerate content.

If you need constant framerate, you will have to set a specific frame rate.

LasVegas

[patters]

There's a bit of a misconception as to how much Serviio is involved in playback of files. All it does is send the data - your device plays the file. In the case of transcoding then FFmpeg processes the file. So with issues of compatibility with certain encoder features like this it's unlikely to be Serviio at fault. Since we're using FFmpeg to remux all MP4 containers (as per the Sony Bluray device profile) then I'd say the problem is quite likely to be with FFmpeg. You could try replacing the FFmpeg binary in Serviio's lib folder with a newer one from the web perhaps. However I read on here somewhere that there are some syntax changes is newer builds which break Serviio - so maybe you'll have to wait for Serviio 0.6.

I also used the latest Handbrake recently to encode a DVD to H.264 using the iPad preset. I watched the film fine on my iPad from Serviio but I noticed the other night that it wouldn't play on my Sony BDP. I guess this variable framerate thing was the reason.