Subtitles Causes Playback Choppy, Network Issue?

[Dogma18]

Hi guys,

First time here. I have used Universal Media Server for awhile now and have managed to solve some bugs on my own thanks to Google and the forums here. However, now I'm stuck.

So I have the latest official release version 2.6.4 installed and every time I play a video with subtitles enabled, the video and audio becomes choppy. Disabling it confirms that the stuttering occurs only when subtitles are being enabled.
I've tried installing different codec packs and selecting ffdshow instead of LAV for video decoding because I thought the latter had something to do with it but it wasn't the case. Finally I realised from the log that the estimated network speed of my PS3 is somewhere between 8-11 Mb/s only!! I never had it this low before. I remember getting much higher speeds than that.

On a side note, I am using homeplugs to connect my PC to my router, and my PS3 is directly linked to my router. This setup was used in my previous house and I had no problems streaming. I've just moved in to a new place not too long ago and now i've encountered this issue. What could be the problem?

PS: My log is attached to the post but there's no bug traced in it cause there's no error even when the video and audio are choppy.

[SharkHunter]

You use mencoder have you tried using ffmpeg? How to use that? Go in under transcoding tab and move ffmpeg to the top of video engines.

I use subs all the time and have no probs at all (and yes I transcode). You could try and modify the memory limits as well (also under the transcode tab). There are some out of memory in the logs.

[Dogma18]

You use mencoder have you tried using ffmpeg? How to use that? Go in under transcoding tab and move ffmpeg to the top of video engines.

I use subs all the time and have no probs at all (and yes I transcode). You could try and modify the memory limits as well (also under the transcode tab). There are some out of memory in the logs.

- I tried loading the video by selecting the ffmpeg version in the Transcode folder on my PS3 and the same problem happened. Is that the same thing as moving ffmpeg engine to the top?

- Which one is memory limits?

[SharkHunter]

- I tried loading the video by selecting the ffmpeg version in the Transcode folder on my PS3 and the same problem happened. Is that the same thing as moving ffmpeg engine to the top?

Should be.

- Which one is memory limits?

You should have something called "Maximum transcode buffer size in MB:". Try change that and see if you get any luck.

[SubJunk]

It's probably that the transcoding quality is too high for your network. I recommend trying the 3.0-a1 release and running the wizard, that will set some good settings for you automatically that might help

[emutt]

It's probably that the transcoding quality is too high for your network. I recommend trying the 3.0-a1 release and running the wizard, that will set some good settings for you automatically that might help

I was having the same issue when playing vids with subs. on 3.0-a2. Once I made sure the network bandwidth was set to the default or = 110 the issues seems
to disappear. I'll watch a few via mencoder to confirm.

EDIT: testing regression to other versions...will report back when I find something.
OK...spent a few hours trying to isolate the issue.
I could not get the choppy/jerkiness on playback with subtitles to go away in 3.0-a1-2 or 2.6.5 or 2.6.4
2.6.3 does not have the issue.

with regard to the s_vobsub or s_hdmv type of subs stuttering I could not isolate that issue. They dont play regardless in 2.6.3
from what i can tell.
The best way I found to not have this issue was to use the live subtitles option and find the subs there as they are in s_text format and dont
have that issue.

I'll test out any new 3.0x releases to see if they have been resolved.

I have a PS3 ethernet to medial server in home office that hdmi-> Pioneer Kuro plasma. Setting the default renderer to Kuro and dont use auto detect...
that seemed to help as well. But at this point with so many different attempts to isolate things...who knows what that did.

[SuperDre]

hmmm.. this might explain some stuff I have lately... I have very choppy playback with subtitles on with the latest versions, I thought it was my computer (which is getting old) but I never used to have (a lot) of this, but lately I seem to have it with A LOT of 720p movies (1080p only works sometimes when I don't use subtitles and it doesn't have to transcode (so it's already in a PS3 'native' codec))..
with the alpha 3, I used the wizard for letting it set all defaults. But now I have just set the transcoding quality back to what I had in earlier versions (keyint=1:vqscale=1:vqmin=1), hope this will help get rid of some of the choppy playback..