[mythtv-users] Internal player won't play video streamed to file on my MythTV system

[James Miller]

This post refers to a MythTV 0.28 BE/FE installation that runs under 
Gentoo. I sometimes "record" on this system a video/audio stream from the 
internet (rtmp) by using mplayer -dumpstream -dumpfile myfile.flv 
rtmp://target.URL (not sure if I'm assigning the right extension for this 
file). mplayer is able to play back the resulting file just fine on this 
system, btw.

But I can't if, say, I copy the file to the videos folder, seem to get the 
file to play using MythTV's internal player via the frontend. If, using 
the MythTV frontend interface, I navigate to videos and select the file 
for playback, it appears to start; but the screen just goes black and the 
system seems to freeze for a bit, staying that way until it eventually 
responds to pressing the "escape" key. So I'm trying to discover whether 
there is some way I will be able to play this file using MythTV.

Here's mediainfo output for one such file, in case it will be helpful:

General
Complete name                            : /var/lib/mythtv/videos/myfile.flv
Format                                   : Flash Video
File size                                : 2.16 GiB
Duration                                 : 11 h 3 min
Overall bit rate                         : 467 kb/s
_Server                                  : NGINX RTMP (github.com/arut/nginx-rtmp-module)
_displayWidth                            : 1280.000
_displayHeight                           : 720.000
_fps                                     : 60.000

Video
Format                                   : AVC
Format/Info                              : Advanced Video Codec
Format profile                           : High at L3.1
Format settings                          : CABAC / 1 Ref Frames
Format settings, CABAC                   : Yes
Format settings, ReFrames                : 1 frame
Codec ID                                 : 7
Duration                                 : 11 h 3 min
Bit rate                                 : 4 600 kb/s
Width                                    : 1 280 pixels
Height                                   : 720 pixels
Display aspect ratio                     : 16:9
Frame rate mode                          : Constant
Frame rate                               : 60.000 FPS
Color space                              : YUV
Chroma subsampling                       : 4:2:0
Bit depth                                : 8 bits
Scan type                                : Progressive
Bits/(Pixel*Frame)                       : 0.083
Stream size                              : 21.3 GiB

Audio
Format                                   : AAC
Format/Info                              : Advanced Audio Codec
Format profile                           : LC
Codec ID                                 : 10-2
Duration                                 : 11 h 3 min
Bit rate                                 : 125 kb/s
Channel(s)                               : 2 channels
Channel positions                        : Front: L R
Sampling rate                            : 48.0 kHz
Frame rate                               : 46.875 FPS (1024 SPF)
Compression mode                         : Lossy
Delay relative to video                  : -1 s 9 ms
Stream size                              : 593 MiB (27%)

Some of that information is clearly wrong: duration of this video is 
actually around 1 hour, not 11 hours and some minutes. I'm uncertain what 
"Stream size" under "Video" is supposed to be referring to, but it 
certainly doesn't correlate to the file's size on disk (the file's 
size-on-disk is about 1/10th of the value shown). The "Stream size" item 
under "Audio" also seems way out of proportion.

So, will some sort of re-encoding be required before the internal player 
will play this file? Is some adjustment to the player's settings 
necessary? Tips on things I might do to enable my system to play this file 
using MythTV's internal player via the frontend will be appreciated. It 
would be a lot more convenient to play this sort of file using the MythTV 
interface rather than having to page to a different virtual desktop 
(evilwm) and invoke mplayer from the command line there. Thanks.