[mythtv-users] FIXED: Can't reexport SMB share over NFS...what am I doing wrong?

Scott Alfter scott at alfter.us
Mon Sep 13 21:40:29 UTC 2010


On 10 Sep 10 11:26, Raymond Wagner wrote:
> Just mount the CIFS share directly on your frontend, or better yet, use storage
> groups and let MythTV share it for you.

I migrated my videos over to storage groups; it didn't appear to fix the
problem.  I eventually figured out where I was going wrong: Matroska files, as
near as I can tell, still don't play well with MythTV.

I had some files that played properly and others that didn't.  Looking at
network traffic on the files that didn't play properly revealed that they were
streamed in high-bandwidth bursts about 20 seconds apart, with little to no
traffic in between.  Watching mythfrontend's stdout while it played these files
revealed prebuffering pauses every 20 or so seconds.  The files that did play
OK streamed at a more-or-less constant bitrate.  A page I ran across somewhere
(may have been the MythTV wiki) recommended making sure a seektable was built
for each file you're playing if it skips and stutters.  After figuring out that
seektable entries for videos are in the filemarkup table, I saw that there were
no seektable entries for any Matroska files, even after running mythcommflag
with the appropriate options.

The files that played OK tended to be other formats: MPEG-2 program streams and
transport streams recorded by MythTV, AVI files, M4V files, etc.  The files
that glitched tended to be Matroska (MKV) files.

It would appear that mythcommflag doesn't generate seektables for Matroska
files.  Without a seektable, the backend has to guess at how much video to send
at a time...and it appears to do a not-so-good job with the files in my
collection. :-(

I'm now going through my collection with tsMuxeR, converting files from
Matroska to MPEG-2 transport streams (most of my files contain H.264 video and
AC3 audio).  These files, once seektables are created for them, play without a
hitch.  The only downside is that I had backed up most of the Matroska files to
a stack of BD-Rs a while back, but I guess I can redo this conversion from the
backup in the future if necessary.

Scott Alfter
scott at alfter.us


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