<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 4:40 PM, Scott Alfter <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:scott@alfter.us">scott@alfter.us</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
On 10 Sep 10 11:26, Raymond Wagner wrote:<br>
> Just mount the CIFS share directly on your frontend, or better yet, use storage<br>
> groups and let MythTV share it for you.<br>
<br>
I migrated my videos over to storage groups; it didn't appear to fix the<br>
problem. I eventually figured out where I was going wrong: Matroska files, as<br>
near as I can tell, still don't play well with MythTV.<br>
<br>
I had some files that played properly and others that didn't. Looking at<br>
network traffic on the files that didn't play properly revealed that they were<br>
streamed in high-bandwidth bursts about 20 seconds apart, with little to no<br>
traffic in between. Watching mythfrontend's stdout while it played these files<br>
revealed prebuffering pauses every 20 or so seconds. The files that did play<br>
OK streamed at a more-or-less constant bitrate. A page I ran across somewhere<br>
(may have been the MythTV wiki) recommended making sure a seektable was built<br>
for each file you're playing if it skips and stutters. After figuring out that<br>
seektable entries for videos are in the filemarkup table, I saw that there were<br>
no seektable entries for any Matroska files, even after running mythcommflag<br>
with the appropriate options.<br>
<br>
The files that played OK tended to be other formats: MPEG-2 program streams and<br>
transport streams recorded by MythTV, AVI files, M4V files, etc. The files<br>
that glitched tended to be Matroska (MKV) files.<br>
<br>
It would appear that mythcommflag doesn't generate seektables for Matroska<br>
files. Without a seektable, the backend has to guess at how much video to send<br>
at a time...and it appears to do a not-so-good job with the files in my<br>
collection. :-(<br>
<br>
I'm now going through my collection with tsMuxeR, converting files from<br>
Matroska to MPEG-2 transport streams (most of my files contain H.264 video and<br>
AC3 audio). These files, once seektables are created for them, play without a<br>
hitch. The only downside is that I had backed up most of the Matroska files to<br>
a stack of BD-Rs a while back, but I guess I can redo this conversion from the<br>
backup in the future if necessary.<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>I think mythtranscode can build seektables. Check the command-line options.</div><div><br></div><div>Kevin</div></div>