[mythtv-users] Video help with .x264 Matroska video files

Jonathan Rogers me at jonathanrogers.name
Mon Aug 18 23:14:37 UTC 2008


On Mon, Jun 16, 2008 at 12:52 PM, Michael Rice <mikerice1969 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/15/08, Matt Nelson <matt at frozenatom.com> wrote:
>> I have searched through MANY of the forums, helps etc but cannot find
>> anything that has helped my problem.  I have a handful of .x264 Matroska
>> files that I have encoded that play all garbled.  I get the following when I
>> try to play them with the "Internal" mythtv player.  mplayer works fine, but
>> I would like to use the same player for everything:
>
> I think this is a problem with the internal player and prosbably not
> your system.
>
> See: http://svn.mythtv.org/trac/ticket/4419
>
> I haven't tried my files with trunk lately so maybe it's improved by now.

I also think the problem is that the Internal player has buggy and/or
incomplete support for playing Matroska (MKV) files. I've created a
number of Matroska files using mencoder to transcode from ATSC MythTV
recordings to H.264 video and AC3 or MP3 audio, muxing the streams
into a matroska file using the mkvmerge tool from the matroska
project's mkvtoolnix package. The resulting file plays fine in
mplayer, VLC, xine. and Totem (which uses gstreamer internally).

However, they play unevenly and unreliably in ffmpeg's ffplay and
MythTV's internal player. I believe MythTV uses ffmpeg's libavformat
library for reading media file formats, so I suspect its
implementation of Matroska is buggy or incomplete. While mplayer uses
libavformat for decoding video and audio, it uses its own internal
demuxers to read the files. I'm not sure where the demuxing code for
Matroska in VLC, xine, and gstreamer came from.

-- 
Jonathan Rogers


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