Panasonic VIERA® Class E50 Frustration

I have two Panasonic TC-L42E50 televisions and both wipe out the media server every time they are used to view xvid videos. The TV requires these to be transcoded and so Mezzmo does it's duty well. Too Well! When scrolling down the list of shows available, Mezzmo starts the preview of each and every one. It does not take long before FFmpeg.exe has multiple processes going and CPU usage is 99%. This crazy problem has taken me a long time to figure out. Originally I had no idea why I had some 25+ processes running. I have now documented this by playing around on the TV while watching the Mezzmo GUI. Most of the time I only have the service running and didn't know what TV was causing the problem. Well, now I know it was two. :(

I have turned off "Complete partially transcoded audio/video files in background." I have no idea what else I can try. Is there a setting that will prevent the preview from playing if the file needs to be transcoded?

Don't know if you can do it on that TV but turning off preview might work.

Most Viera TV models do have a video preview window and, as you scroll down through your list of videos on your TV, your Viera TV requests the video from Mezzmo server. So, Mezzmo server starts transcoding the incompatible video so it can stream it to your TV. Scrolling quickly down the list of videos on your TV can result in the Viera requesting 100's of videos form Mezzmo server and can result in many files being transcoded. This video preview is not a great feature of Viera TVs for DLNA streaming.

Two things you can do: Check the setting on your TV and turn of video preview. Newer models let you turn it off; older models don't :(. Next, turn off the ""Complete partially transcoded audio/video files in background" checkbox in the Transcoding Settings dialog in Mezzmo. This tells Mezzmo to stop transcoding files that are not being streamed and should reduce the many ffmpeg.exe processes consuming your CPU. Restart your Mezzmo server after making this change.

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Originally Posted by Paul

Next, turn off the ""Complete partially transcoded audio/video files in background" checkbox in the Transcoding Settings dialog in Mezzmo. This tells Mezzmo to stop transcoding files that are not being streamed and should reduce the many ffmpeg.exe processes consuming your CPU. Restart your Mezzmo server after making this change.

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Not sure that works actually Paul.

I'm still transcoding a video file that I'm not streaming and in fact now not even connected to Mezzmo.

I am running 4.0.3.0 though.

Edit to this.

The transcoding does eventually stop without completing the transcode and no transcoded files are saved. However, this termination is nowhere immediate and for maybe a couple of minutes I'm seeing 100% cpu usage. This is on an i7 4770 system.

That's right - it does not stop immediately, but after a few minutes.

Best option , if the TV allows it - is to turn off the preview option. Can't see what is gained by that really.

I guess my TV is one that cannot turn off previews :(

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Originally Posted by Smile

I guess my TV is one that cannot turn off previews :(

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We have one of these Viera models as well and it is frustrating to use it when browsing & playing files from media servers that can transcode on-the-fly like Mezzmo.