MPEG player crashed everything

[Demonic Goldfish]

[EDIT]: I managed to reboot it, but still no dice when it comes to playing this video: hangs indefinitely on a black screen.

Hi all. I have looked for similar problems, but have found none.

A few minutes ago I installed Rock Box on my iPod Nano, booted up, and everything was fine. So I stuck a newly converted 895MB .mpg file on there, and played it. The screen went black, and I realised I had no 'phones plugged in, so I plugged some in. I waited. The screen stayed black. No sound, nothing. So I rebooted the iPod, it booted back into Rock Box, everything was fine. Then I tried to play the video again, and the iPod rebooted. It's still stuck on the boot screen, where it shows the Apple logo, no backlight, and it is completely unresponsive. I can't boot into disk mode, it doesn't mount, nothing.

Does anyone know what could be going wrong here?

Cheers, DG

[LambdaCalculus]

There's some information here you can read up on:

http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/PluginMpegplayer

Also note that Mpegplayer still occasionally chokes on larger files. I've tested MPEGs up to 130MB in size (usually 22 minutes episodes of animated shows), and Mpegplayer runs nicely. But my iPod did choke when I tried a 1-hour movie that weighed in at around 760MB.

Try some smaller file sizes, but also try the Elephants Dream short that's available on the above page. It makes for a great benchmark tester, but it's also pretty entertaining to watch in its own right.

[Llorean]

I've played movie files over 1.5gb without a problem while testing things.

AFAIK, anything over the initial buffer size should either work, or not work, any size beyond that should be irrelevant (I believe).

[LambdaCalculus]

I've played movie files over 1.5gb without a problem while testing things.

I guess mine was a case of "Your mileage may vary". Since I don't use Mpegplayer very often, I never bothered trying any larger files lately. Thanks for the insight, Llorean.

[Llorean]

The large file that's giving problems may simply have something else about it that mpegplayer doesn't like, and it's merely coincidence that it's large.

I personally have almost exclusively used ffmpeg (by way of WinFF) to encode files I've actually used for either personal playback, or various framerate testing, etc. It's become very clear though that other encoders are very clever at finding ways to trip up mpegplayer (and ffmpeg was too, for that matter).

[LambdaCalculus]

On my end, I usually use VLC, having rewrote the script available from the Mpegplayer wiki page for Linux. One plus is that it's easy to feed files to VLC this way, but one huge minus is that VLC mucks up on any file that wasn't an MPEG to begin with; I've sent AVIs, DivX-encoded AVIs, QuickTime movies, and even a couple of XviD videos, only to end up with just one huge audio track and absolutely no video.

If ffmpeg works as well as everyone says it does, then so be it! I'll take the plunge and give it a shot.

[cpchan]

On my end, I usually use VLC, having rewrote the script available from the Mpegplayer wiki page for Linux.

I personally use mencoder.

If ffmpeg works as well as everyone says it does, then so be it! I'll take the plunge and give it a shot.

It shouldn't really matter whether you use mencoder, VLC or ffmpeg. Since they all use avcodec and avformat from ffmpeg (now maintain  on the mplayer servers). FWIW, here is my batch transcoding script using mencoder. Put it on the wiki page if you want.  

Charles



[attachment deleted by admin for age]

[Llorean]

Well I've found that VLC and... umm, one other program I tried though I can't remember if it was mencoder or not, don't handle framerate well. Specifically, there are several fractions used by different codecs to represent 29.97, and with VLC especially, if your input video isn't the 29.97 it's expecting, your output MPEG-2 will have audio but no video. Using the ffmpeg binary, it will handle this situation properly (in my experience).

This if course isn't a problem if you manually set a framerate, but if you don't on the assumption that the video is already a good framerate you end up with unusable files in many cases, where ffmpeg seems to pick the nearest good framerate (for me at least).

So it may not be so much the encoder itself as both the decoder and what parameters are internally given to the encoder.

[cpchan]

Well I've found that VLC and... umm, one other program I tried though I can't remember if it was mencoder or not, don't handle framerate well.

Don't know about VLC since I don't use it. However, I frequently encode videos with non-standard Framerate with mencoder with no problems.  YMMV though since my mplayer/mencoder is compiled from SVN every couple of days.

So it may not be so much the encoder itself as both the decoder and what parameters are internally given to the encoder.

True.

As a side note, can I ask for Wiki editing permission here or should I go on IRC? I am not a big IRC user.

Charles

[GodEater]

IRC is the easiest and quickest way to get it - although if you don't mind posting your wiki name here I'll be happy to set it up for you.

[cpchan]

IRC is the easiest and quickest way to get it - although if you don't mind posting your wiki name here I'll be happy to set it up for you.

Thanks GodEater. my Wiki name is CharlesPhilipChan.

Charles

[GodEater]

Done - you have edit rights.

[cpchan]

Done - you have edit rights.

Thanks, GodEater.

Charles

[GodEater]

np

[Demonic Goldfish]

Thanks for the help guys.

I tried using a different converter, but even a 50MB 5 minute clip doesn't work. I tried to DL elephant's dream, but if I clicked any of the links, I crashed, and it says the torrent is missing. Any ideas?