MPEG player issue

[maretard]

First off, I'd like to say, your work with the MPEG player is absolutely amazing. About a few months ago, the MPEG player wasn't working at all on my iRiver h10 20gig, and now, with a Rockbox SVN from yesterday, it's working (almost) flawlessly.

The one thing I've noticed is a bit annoying. All the audio to my videos stops playing after about 1-3 minutes (depending on how "intense" the audio is - silence takes up less buffer room than music, for example), while the video continues playing until the end of the clip. Is this just because MPEG player still isn't "finished," or is there something I'm doing wrong? I'm sure my videos are correct, because I'm converting a movie to .MPG format and then shrinking it with Blaze Media Pro to 160x120 for my screen dimensions, and the audio is 128 kbps 44100 kHz.

Thanks a bunch!

[Llorean]

Your videos aren't correct enough, it seems. I don't know what "Blaze Media Pro" is like, but properly converted videos will play audio the whole way through.

Have you tried playing these same files on your PC to verify them? (As in, the exact files you copy to your player)?

[maretard]

Thanks for the quick reply!

Yep, the video works on my computer perfectly. I remember reading about some audio buffer issues with MPEG player a while back; have those been completely fixed? Blaze works great for resizing and requalifying (kHz-wise) videos, and also converts stuff from MPG, WMV, and AVI. I'll try the video again, maybe it was just a freak coincidence or something. =/

[Llorean]

Try using one of the tools recommended in the Wiki, first. And of course, I assume you're using an up to date, official build.

[maretard]

Yeah, about that - I tried all the tools in the Wiki, but none of them would output anything that would play correctly. I kept getting "Unsupported file format" on .mp4 files, and the .mpg files that did come out wouldn't play, and the plugin kept returning errors. So far, Blaze is the only tool that's been able to successfully encode a video for me.

Definitely up-to-date, just updated again to today's.

Just got another movie into it, testing tonight, will update tomorrow.

[cool_walking_]

silence takes up less buffer room than music, for example

Sorry to take the thread off on a tangent, but I don't think this is right, and if my understanding is wrong, I'd like to find out.  It may be that MP3/Ogg Vorbis/WMA/etc. compress silence better than noisy areas (I have no idea), but this has to be converted to raw audio data in order to be played, and this takes up the same amount of space no matter what sort of sound it is.

Perhaps your .mp4 files have DRM, which is why the programs listed on the Wiki don't work.

Provides a solution to convert DRM protected WMA files, convert protected AAC and M4P files, and convert OMA to MP3, WAV, WMA, OGG

[ericslaw]

My MPlayer/Mencoder MPEG files play video too fast, but only on my nano.

I'm using the following command (modeled from the examples in the RockBox wiki) to create the video:

mencoder.exe \
dvd://1 -dvd-device e: \
-of mpeg \
-oac lavc -lavcopts acodec=mp2:abitrate=96 \
-af resample=44100:0:0 \
-ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg2video:vbitrate=100:vmax_b_frames=16:vb_strategy=2 \
-vf scale=176:96,harddup \
-ofps 30000/1001 \
-o sample.mpg

The result is a video file that plays just fine using mplayer, vlc, and xulplayer on the desktop.
I have a Sansa e250 2GB player with the same version of rockbox and it plays just fine.

I get the distinct impression that the video is playing back 'as fast as it can'... ie: some parts seem faster than others.
I tried various framerates (25, 30000/1001 =~ 30, etc), and have varied the video bitrate (100,200,300,600) but
all the results seem the same.

XUL player shows me some of the container information and I noticed that the video bitrate field is 0.
Could that be way it tries to play so fast?
The audio is clear and normal sounding the entire time.

Thanks
Eric

[Llorean]

Are you sure you never disabled the option to limit framerate and skip frames? Both of these should be enabled for proper playback.

[ericslaw]

Paul, I had a feeling you'd reply quickly to this... for that I thank you.

I had been playing with those Limit FPS and Skip Frame options, but as it turns out, they were what did the trick.
Seems like once I dropped by video bitrate down to something the nano could handle, the 'skip frame' was less relevant,
but the Limit FPS became important.

Sorry to have wasted your time, but I hope this thread helps the next person with this issue
(Googling the web wasn't very helpful for me today).

Thanks very much

(Oh and the mpeg viewer plugin has dramatically improved over the last few versions...
I really like the 'set start time' option (with preview too!)
Now if I could just figure out why the sansa 'set start time' increments in seconds, while the nano increments in minutes....

[Llorean]

Up / Down increment minutes, Left / Right increment seconds, as long as both are using an absolute current build. But I'm not sure if they both use the wheel the same way (one might treat it as up/down, the other left/right if the mapping is imperfect).

[maretard]

Wow, sorry for completely forgetting about this thread. T_T
So, the videos work fine now, everything's great - However, whenever I try to pick a place to start playing a large video file, Rockbox freezes and won't let me do anything until I do a hard reset. The preview doesn't show up, and it just loads forever.

Something to do with the buffer? I don't know...

I don't know about the silence thing, but I'm playing a song on Winamp right now with a kbps monitor, and silent parts play at about 128 kbps and noisy parts at 256-320. Sound fishy? =/

[Llorean]

Silence ,does take up less compressed buffer. Uncompressed audio is CBR by nature. But that's most likely entirely irrelevant to this problem.

What SVN revision are you running now, and how long is a "long" video? We need objective information to be able to help.

[maretard]

I'm using a release that's about a month old; I should definitely get that updated, but I can't at the moment. The video in question is about 100 megabytes (comedy show), and the other ones that I can choose the starting point of are about 20-30 megabytes (music videos).

[Llorean]

Considering the constant state of change of code, we really need to ask you to update and verify the problem still exists.

[maretard]

Haha, unfortunately, my iRiver just broke the other day. I dropped it on the headphone plug, and the solder connecting the headphone port to the circuit board snapped on one end.
I'm now a proud owner of an 80 gig second-generation Zune, but as Rockbox doesn't support that (yet? * excited look *), I won't be able to test this any further.