[mythtv-users] Can't play x264 encoded video, mythfrontend crash

[Taco Mel]

Replying to my own post because I have learned some
more things and I am actually pretty close to having
this working.

First, I had been encoding to MPEG-4 and using the AAC
audio codec.  Turns out, I could not play the MPEG-4
and H.264 with any audio (tried AAC and MP3) but I
could make it work without sound.

Second, I tried using mencoder to use MP3 on the audio
and H.264 on the video, 2 pass, bitrate 1400.  I let
this write to the default container (AVI) and did not
subsequently convert that to MPEG-4.  I got this to
work and to play in the MythTV player, sort of.  Here
are my remaining issues and I hope that I can get some
advice:

1) Aforementioned crash when having sound in an
MPEG-4. That was my first post on this topic.

2) All of the default H.264 profiles I have examined
thus far suggest setting keyframes around every
240-300 frames.  However I found that skipping around
in the MythTV player, it does not start at the
keyframe, resulting in distorted display for up to 6
seconds.  Then it hits the keyframe and works fine
from then on.  My "workaround" if you call it that is
to set a keyframe every 15 seconds so the distortion
lasts at most a half second.  I did do "mythcommflag
--file ... --rebuild" to no avail.

3) I transcoded one longer recording (2 hours 15
minutes) and achieved an impressive reduction from 5.0
GB to 1.3 GB.  However this recording did not do well
in Myth.  It played fine but when I did any skipping,
the progress bar indicated the "new" position but the
video itself was not advanced, audio or video.  After
a few seconds the player crashed.  This recording
plays and looks great in mplayer and skips around as
it should.

Can anyone give some answers or advice on where to
look to resolve these issues?  Or is playing H.264
content with the internal MythTV player just not
feasible at this time?


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