Strange issue with H264TSAC3. 3.0.0-a5/6 and probably others

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elpetak
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Joined: Thu Mar 28, 2013 3:57 pm

Strange issue with H264TSAC3. 3.0.0-a5/6 and probably others

Post by elpetak »

A few weeks ago and after a long time of not using UMS I installed (clean install) 3.0.0-a5 and a few days ago I used the UMSbuilder to get 3.0.0-a6.
I'm using wifi and I need subs so transcoding to H264 is really a blessing for me since it really gets much better quality for wifi bandwidth.

After playing a file for a while with audio being transcoded to AC3 5.1, something strange happened.
Audio went away and white noise kicked in and in the PS3 screen it jumped from DolbyDigital to LPCM and at the same time the video started like fast forwarding. Not even the external audio decoder can understand what's going on.
I stopped playback, started again from the begining and used the seek-to feature tu jump back to where it failed.

(This is when I noticed mencoder fails to seek when transcoding to H264 but I opened another topic for that. This topic is for the weird apparently random issue.)

With FFMPEG the same strange thing happens, audio switches to what the PS3 shows in screen as LPCM and video starts fast-forwarding after a while which seems to be random, sometimes 15 to 17 minutes, other times just 4 or 5 minutes.
Anyway, I stop the video, restart from begining and seek to the position where I was (which with ffmpeg works) and playback continues.
It doesn't fail again on the same part of the movie so it doesn't look like a bad frame or something.
And the logs say nothing at all. Not a single error.

I'm thinking maybe it could be some malformed H264 output frame or maybe oversized or something but I really have no idea what's going on.
I only noticed this when using H264.

Is it a known issue? I searched the forum and couldn't fidn anything like this.
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SubJunk
Lead Developer
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Joined: Sun May 27, 2012 4:12 pm

Re: Strange issue with H264TSAC3. 3.0.0-a5/6 and probably ot

Post by SubJunk »

That does seem strange. H264TSAC3 is largely untested. Maybe I'll set it as my default format and try to reproduce the issue
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Madoka
Posts: 328
Joined: Fri Jun 01, 2012 12:51 pm

Re: Strange issue with H264TSAC3. 3.0.0-a5/6 and probably ot

Post by Madoka »

This may have been fixed already....

I've tried all the alphas and betas and will set H264TSAC3 in the PS3 conf, but I've never had a file play successfully. I get a "This content cannot be played" error, and it won't even start. I hadn't mentioned it as I thought this was still being tested, but I thought I'd mention it here.
Vallimar
Posts: 36
Joined: Fri Oct 04, 2013 1:15 pm

Re: Strange issue with H264TSAC3. 3.0.0-a5/6 and probably ot

Post by Vallimar »

There are still issues. If you have trouble playing anything, try making sure the "Keep AC-3 tracks" option is disabled.
That was one source of issues for me. Also, this does not work if you are linked against an x264 library compiled with
10bit output instead of the standard 8bit.

Other than those things, I tried this again yesterday and still get the failure to seek with mencoder and the audio/video
glitching in ffmpeg previously mentioned. This is all on a PS3 slim. I have wondered if changing from TS to PS might
help but I don't know if that would work and haven't tried.
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Madoka
Posts: 328
Joined: Fri Jun 01, 2012 12:51 pm

Re: Strange issue with H264TSAC3. 3.0.0-a5/6 and probably ot

Post by Madoka »

Thanks for the help! Turns out for me unchecking "Use LPCM" did the trick. But I still hang when seeking with mencoder. And there as an occasional font size difference with ffmpeg when using h264 (looks normal) vs mpeg (occasional fonts too big) and .ass subs.
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