Videos do not play

[rcarballo]

This problem is driving me bananas.

I have a RPI3 with Myth Light v0.28. Everything has been updated. Myth recordings play fine. Live TV plays fine. Playing videos (.mp4, .mpg) returns the dreaded "video frame buffering failed too many times". In the video settings, the default video player is set to INTERNAL.

If I run the mythfrontend built for OS/X, I can play any video w/o any problems. So, the issue is not with the backend but the frontend that is running on the RPi.

I have attached the Frontend's log ("myth.log").

I'd really appreciate any feedback on this issue. Thank you.

/Antonio

[pgbennett]

It looks like your file is MPEG4 part 2. I have no problem playing videos with that encoding. Possibly something is different with your video. There are many variations of MPEG4 part 2 and perhaps it is using an incompatible option. I have no problem with MPEG4 or H264 videos encoded with HandBrake.

You can try editing your video playback profile and changing your decoder to Standard instead of openmax. When I do that the MPEG4 file plays poorly. You may have better results. Note that using Standard decoder will not work with H264 files, but may work with other types. The processor is not powerful enough and H264 files play slowly and jerkily with Standard decoder.

Note that if you try the Standard decoder make sure the number of CPUs is set to 4.

[rcarballo]

I switched to Standard with 4 procs. No change in the results. This time MythFrontEnd crashes.
I switched to OpenMax Min and the same thing happens. MythFrontEnd crashes too.
At this point no profile works with any video. I tried two different movies. Same results.

I have created two logs with full debugging info. Logs were pretty big; I trimmed them but left the pertinent info.. Maybe you can spot something my eyes can't seem to see,

Standard profile at https://goo.gl/Wyp8k8
OpenMax Min profile at https://goo.gl/66qp1z

Those are links to the files in my Google Drive. Make copy as needed.

/Antonio

[pgbennett]

Is everything set up as per the wiki? There are some recommendations there.

https://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi

In particular, make sure gpu memory is set to 256

If that does not resolve it, please can you make an extract of a movie that fails, the first 50MB should be OK. You can use dd to extract the first 50 MB.
You can share it with dropbox or some other method.

[rcarballo]

OK. Let me go over the Wiki guide and verify everything.
If I can't get it to work, I will post a link to a video clip for you to test.

Thanks for the response. I'll be in touch...

/Antonio

[rcarballo]

Went over the Wiki Guide and my RPi3 is in compliance with memory and drivers. I have the MPG2 license and GPU is set to 256MB. Video profile is set to "OpenMax normal" and the audio is set to the "ALSA:default".

I put a short video (see link below) in the PI's local folder for the client to play directly from it but it ran into the same problem. It didn't crash but I had to kill the task as it got stuck at "Please wait..." for over 5 minutes.

50MB (4-5m duration) video in my GDrive: https://goo.gl/vwLHQa

/Antonio

[pgbennett]

I have the same problem trying to play this video. I will look into it and see if I can find what causes the problem.

[pgbennett]

The Raspberry Pi MythTV seems to have a problem with the MP4 file format in this file. I tried a bunch of things

The original file you posted will not play.

Copying the mp4 to a new mp4 with ffmpeg - file still will not play.

Code: Select all

ffmpeg -i rcarballo.mp4 -acodec copy -vcodec copy rcarballo_copy.mp4

Copying the file to an mkv with mkvmerge - file plays OK.

Code: Select all

mkvmerge -o rcarballo_mkv.mkv rcarballo.mp4

Copy the mkv file back to an mp4 with ffmpeg - file plays OK.

Code: Select all

ffmpeg -i rcarballo_mkv.mkv -acodec copy -vcodec copy rcarballo_mkv_mp4.mp4

The copy commands are very quick, no transcoding is done, so this may be a suitable work-around for you.

[rcarballo]

I see the problem. I used Brosoft DVD Ripper on my MAC to rip the DVDs.

Let me convert them per your instructions and get back to you. Thanks for the feedback.

/Antonio

[pgbennett]

I have created a ticket for this problem, so we can look at it and if possible fix in a future release
https://code.mythtv.org/trac/ticket/12940#ticket

[rcarballo]

OK. Your work-around got the videos playing again with Mythfrontend under Raspian.

I ripped another DVD but this time I used H.265 for HD as the file type. Mythfrontend had no problems playing that type.

/Antonio