Divx transcoding frustrations :(

[pootle]

Hi guys,

I'm running a mediaMVP and I'm tyrin to transcode divx to it on the fly using ffmpeg as I've been told it can do...

I installed the K-Lite FULL codec pack which has ffmpeg bundled with it.

I'm now running gb-pvr off a XP3200+ with 1gig of ram but I still only get about 10-15 seconds of playback before it cuts out.

Is it possible to transcode divx on the fly or what? I've got the maximum ammount of time set to wait before begining play back and it just doesn't work . I'd love to get some solid answers on this cheers.

[djtaylor]

Hi guys,

I'm running a mediaMVP and I'm tyrin to transcode divx to it on the fly using ffmpeg as I've been told it can do...

I installed the K-Lite FULL codec pack which has ffmpeg bundled with it.

I'm now running gb-pvr off a XP3200+ with 1gig of ram but I still only get about 10-15 seconds of playback before it cuts out.

Is it possible to transcode divx on the fly or what? I've got the maximum ammount of time set to wait before begining play back and it just doesn't work . I'd love to get some solid answers on this cheers.

Does it do it with all AVI files or just this one?

David.

[daphatty]

Unfortunately, there are no solid answers. Yes, the MVP can playback Divx files but unless the conditions are perfect, you are more than likely going to have problems. Even then there is a potential for failure. All you can do is make sure that your Divx file matches your region's TV (PAL/NTSC) framerate and pray that your MVP feels like working.

Can you tell I gave up on this?

[pootle]

seems to be all files so far! Its all very confusing to be honest. Has anyone ever had any success with Streaming Divx to MediaMVP? Because so far I have had feck all success...the only thing i haven't tried is running it through the original beta software from hauppauge.

[daphatty]

seems to be all files so far! Its all very confusing to be honest. Has anyone ever had any success with Streaming Divx to MediaMVP? Because so far I have had feck all success...the only thing i haven't tried is running it through the original beta software from hauppauge.

Something that might help is running your vids through AVIcodec to see which ones adhere to your region's video standard (NTSC 29.97 fps/PAL 25fps(?)) and work with those. Also, try to use vids are 4:3. I find that widescreen or vids that are made smaller (320x240) also cause playback problems.

[djtaylor]

seems to be all files so far! Its all very confusing to be honest. Has anyone ever had any success with Streaming Divx to MediaMVP? Because so far I have had feck all success...the only thing i haven't tried is running it through the original beta software from hauppauge.

Yes, mine work fine on two MVP's, I haven't done anything magic to make it so either.

David.

[djtaylor]

I have just been playing around and might have some help for those frustrated with divx/xvid decoding.

Mine play back fine except that the behaviour is a little zoomed in compared with that which is displayed on the PC. Main issue here being that one TV that i'm playing back to is 4:3 whereas the source xvid file is 16:9.

So I thought that I would play around with the command line that is sent to ffmpeg.

I started off with the following which worked fine but zoomed:-

<MVPFFmpegTranscodeCmdLinePAL>-y -i "{SOURCE_FILE}" -b 2400 -r 25 -s 352x288 -vcodec mpeg2video "{DEST_FILE}"</MVPFFmpegTranscodeCmdLinePAL>

352x288 being PAL quarter frame and it looks like the MVP autosizes that to full screen as a recognised PAL size. Whether I tried 720x576 or the 352x288, it resizes to full screen but slightly zoomed.

So, next I tried slightly odd values for the sizing such as 304x200. This actually worked well except that the video sat top left of the screen and wasn't expanded to fill so the next thing was to bump it to the right and down.

Adding -padleft 40 and -padtop 50 as below introduced a curious result. The video was now correctly centred vertically and had just a slight black border to the left.

<MVPFFmpegTranscodeCmdLinePAL>-y -i "{SOURCE_FILE}" -b 2400 -r 25 -s 304x200 -padleft 40 -padtop 50 -vcodec mpeg2video "{DEST_FILE}"</MVPFFmpegTranscodeCmdLinePAL>

So next I thought I would reduce the left padding by 10 to 30. The result was that when I tried to play the video, the MVP rebooted. I then put it back to the previous working value of 40 and it still rebooted. In fact, put it back to 352x288 and it *still* rebooted even though that was my starting point.

Giving up on the downstairs MVP, I moved to the one upstairs. Pretty much the same behaviour in that it worked for a while but as soon as I had set values to those that caused a reboot, no end of setting them back restores it. I haven't found an elegant recovery yet but I thought this might be of some use to those that can't get it going in the first place. Try changing the scaling values and see what happens? I wonder if some are already trying to default scale such that the MVP reboots straight away?

David.

[daphatty]

It's ironic that you mention the reboots. That's pretty much what happened to me just before I gave up trying. In the end, I decided to keep it simple. I really bought the MVP to watch my recorded shows in the bedroom. Any AVIs that I have I can watch directly on my TV in the front room via DVI and I don't have to fuss over them.

[djtaylor]

It's ironic that you mention the reboots. That's pretty much what happened to me just before I gave up trying. In the end, I decided to keep it simple. I really bought the MVP to watch my recorded shows in the bedroom. Any AVIs that I have I can watch directly on my TV in the front room via DVI and I don't have to fuss over them.

Pretty much same here, playing the AVI's is a convenience but because of the zoom effect, i'm actually spending the afternoon figuring out enough mencoder options to size it correctly and stop it playing at the top left of the screen but rather get it central.

In other words, I can happily watch AVI's but it's not why I stuck all this together, i'd like to get it all working how I want it to if for no other reason than i'm bloody minded!

David.

[wtg]

I'm an NTSC user and with all things MVP, your mileage my vary, but I've been able to get AVI's playing on my MVPs by changing the default bitrate of 2400 to 2000 in config.xml. Someone else recommended it and it has worked well.

My AVI's are almost all 512x384, high bitrate 2-pass xvids. This is what the command line in config.xml looks like:

Code:

<MVPFFmpegTranscodeCmdLineNTSC>-y -i "{SOURCE_FILE}" -b 2000 -s 352x240 -vcodec mpeg2video "{DEST_FILE}"</MVPFFmpegTranscodeCmdLineNTSC>