Apple Media players?

[Trellspar]

Here's a pack. Thanks.

(I'll try again)

[mik_s]

The logs you posted were incomplete and look edited. Did you replace all the IP addresses?
There is no need to do this as they are your local private IPs only accessible within your network and will be something like 192.168.xxx.xxx or 10.xxx.xxx.xxx, same as everyone else's.The logs do not contain any public IPs. More info about public v private IPs here
I can't see what your settings are or what render conf is being used as they were not included in the zip file.
Could you redo then but leave them unaltered and packed from within UMS, and make sure you turn off the force renderer option so I can see why it is not matching properly.

TranscodeVideo and TranscodeVideo are there to set what format the files will be transcoded to and should be correct.
"none" is not a valid option so is defaulting to "MPEGPS-MPEG2-AC3", this is what is used on DVDs and digital TV as it uses little processing power but it takes up a lot of network bandwidth.
The speed to your apple is 44mb/s which might not be enough for this, I remember on my PS3 and needing nearly double that for a perfect playback, but this was a while ago so may be wrong on what speeds I had. The speed is more than enough if you reset these settings to what they were.
If you want to know what the options mean in the conf then have a look at DefaultRenderer.conf as that documents all the settings.

From what I can see those videos are being transcoded still. Maybe because they are in the m4v format but need to see exactly which conf is being used.
I don't know much about m4v except it's apples version of MP4 with DRM, maybe renaming them to mp4 will allow them to work.
If this is the reason I can modify a conf for you so it works properly. Do these play with the no transcoding option from the #-TRANSCODE--# folder?

[Trellspar]

I'll try to submit new logs. I'm going to delete the UMS config folder, and delete and restore the original .app file for UMS, and just use defaults on everything I can. But for that configuration, there will be much to fix. Because I'm only hosting two files (one with H264 video, AC3 audio, and SRT subtitles, and the other with H264 video, AAC audio, and SRT subtitles), I can transcode to .mp4 instead of .m4v. The Apple Media Sharing and the built-in video player app on the Apple TV are able to deliver flawless playback at 1080i with surround sound and subtitles which are easily switched on and off, but the Apple solution sometimes fails for varying periods of time for unknown reasons after either the serving computer or the Apple TV media player receives an update. I can test my network speeds at speedtest.net using several devices, and both ways are nearly always above 800 or even 900 mbps. I don't know exactly how to test more specifically for local speed.

I hope that I will be able to apply more appropriate corrections after you've seen the logs from that configuration, but these are the problems I anticipate.

1) Videos can fail to start, with progress indicator appearing briefly then exit of playback, presumably because the video titles are being transcoded incorrectly.
2) When playing from the #-TRANSCODE--# folder, the titles play without error except for some stutter which is intermittent (several seconds go by before I can spot the next instance of jerk), and the jerk is not overwhelming, it looks similar to playing telecine without pullup except that it's not that frequent or regular).
3) Forwarding or rewinding when playing without transcoding results in playback exiting.

Thanks again.

[Trellspar]

I'm now convinced that all that was needed was to host .mp4 files instead of .m4v. I did as I intended, which was to remove all vestiges I could find from the previous configuration of UMV and start over, except that I served .mp4 versions of the same videos instead of .m4v versions. I then moved a .m4v into the shared folder, and the problems returned just for that video. I then replaced the .m4v with the .mp4 version of the same file, and, after restarting both UMS and Apple TV, the .mp4 file played without any of the previous issues as well.

I'm not sure whether the problem was caused by UMS or by VLC, but it doesn't really matter, because changing the format for whatever I serve will be easy enough.

Thanks.

[Trellspar]

Here's the log anyway. I have two Apple TV units, and although the 3rd generation doesn't appear to show the slight judder, the 4K does. I can't figure it, because that's the only problem that remains, and only for the Apple TV 4K. The source videos are the same. I left out some of the repetitive internal content of the logs, because they grew too large to upload. Thanks.

(Saw your reply, thanks.)

[mik_s]

You don't need to worry about removing repetitive parts of the logs, when packing then the total filesize will be a lot smaller and cutting parts could miss important information. I have filters set up in my log viewer program to find the important parts. Editing parts also has the effect of leaving junk files in the zip file which was confusing me. I now saw that your last logs did have the settings file, just that it did not show where I was expecting it.

OK looks like these files were just MP4s and are detected properly now so are streamed.

I can now see that it is using "VLC for iOS" for the conf file which looks to be correct going off the headers. I think the problem is that m4v are not defined in that conf so UMS thought that they were unsupported by the renderer.

I have added them to the supported formats in this conf which you can replace the existing one with

Apple-iDevice-VLC.conf

(1.71 KiB) Downloaded 420 times

This version of the VLC conf does not have all the individual codecs that are supported in the files and only lists the filetype. This should not be a problem as VLC can play just about everything so listing every possible format is not needed, but just to be sure you should try playing a video that uses h265 encoding. If that fails to play then I will have to modify one of the other confs to work instead.

Let me know if this works for m4v files so I can pass this on to the devs to include this change in future versions.

[Trellspar]

I'll let you know. Thanks again!

[Trellspar]

One more thing. Do you recommend removing the renderers that specifically refer to Apple TV when I incorporate the one you just provided? There's one for VLC for Apple TV, and another for VLC for Apple TV 4K. All renderers remain enabled in my current configuration, and VLC for Apple TV is chosen, not forced. Thanks.

[Trellspar]

The new file, when used to replace the existing one having the same name, doesn't appear to make any difference. I didn't remove other existing files yet, though, so your answer to my previous post about whether to remove other renderer files may determine how to proceed. Thanks.

[Trellspar]

Here are some more observations that may be pertinent. I don't think the iOS renderer is being used on the Apple TV 4K, because if I disable the Apple TV and Apple TV 4K renderers for VLC, but use the recent Apple-iDevice-VLC.conf you provided, VLC on Apple TV and Apple TV 4K can't find my UMS media. For that reason, it seems to me the Apple-iDevice-VLC.conf file isn't affecting the issue I'm having. The issue, more precisely described, is that on the Apple TV 4K, there is a jump that happens occasionally and varies in frequency from about 5-15 seconds. It looks like one or more dropped frames. I believe that eyes less invested than mine in observing these types of playback issues might easily miss them, but to me they are quite apparent. Audio does not seem to be affected. Another characteristic of this glitch is that it doesn't occur at precisely the same point in playback each time. However, there are passages in the videos in which the glitch is more regular and more prominent.

My assessment of the Apple solution for playing these titles using Apple TV 3rd Generation and Apple TV 4K is that problems only exist intermittently, and only for initializing playback. If playback can be initialized, no other quality issues can be detected using either Apple TV device. I'm unable to see these quality issues for VLC playback of UMS content when viewing from Apple TV 3rd Generation, only from Apple TV 4K.

I apologize if this seems hubristic, I don't mean it to be. Thanks for your help.