Profile Modification Question

[Aaron407]

The file was in the midst of being transcoded. It does seem as though it would only jump to the furthest point in the encoding process, like you mention. I guess I was thinking it would work similar to Tversity. I've had a number of files transcoding that I could still fully seek in while watching on the PS3, including jumping to a time far in the file beyond where it had already transcoded to. Maybe it's a DLNA constraint that Tversity is capable of bypassing by not being fully compliant.

Please feel free to give various other users and other issues more attention. I feel like I'm somewhat dominating your time with this one issue when you may have various other things to tend to.

[Paul]

I think that because TVersity is using codecs, as opposed to FFmpeg, it may allow you to start transcoding at any point. The interesting question would be - what happens to the first part of the movie if you want to watch it from the start - does it re-transcode the whole thing again then?

[Aaron407]

I can only assume it would have to re-transcode and probably lose any other progress. To me that would be fine since I have a dedicated computer for a media server and it's not a problem to tie up the processor with constant re-transcoding, but it might not work for everyone. I realize the option in Mezzmo would be to pre-transcode everything, but unfortunately I don't have the hard drive space or time for pre-transcoding over 200 movies.

I get the feeling I may be asking a bit too much of the software, which may be pushing it beyond its original design intent. I know your time is limited and valuable, so I won't be offended if you decide focus on bigger and better things rather than working on selling me on the program :-)

Thanks for all your effort thus far.

[Paul]

No worries - we're trying to make Mezzmo the best DLNA server out there and each small step towards that is a good thing Some interesting ideas are coming up in conversations, so I'm happy to discuss things.

[Aaron407]

Good to hear. I just wanted to make sure I wasn't pushing my luck with this

If you have anything you want me to try out/test I'd be happy to offer my time since you're obviously putting in a lot of your own time to find solutions for me/us.

[Aaron407]

I discovered one more detail regarding the MP4 compatibility issue that may be noteworthy. I found a program (MP4cam2avi) that I was able to use to transfer the MP4 video stream into an AVI container (Xvid 4cc I believe) without transcoding. This was easily handled by the bluray player through mezzmo without transcoding and was listed as a DivX file. To me this means it should probably just be a matter of communicating the video stream contents through mezzmo to have it natively supported via streaming, but I'm not completely sure. Anyway, I hope this may help in the effort!

[Paul]

Can you please post FFmpeg information on the file that program created?

[Aaron407]

Here's the ffmpeg info for the file that mp4cam2avi created. Note that ac3 audio is not compatible with the program, so it didn't carry any audio (or subtitles) through into the final avi file. There was no transcoding of the video stream, it merely copied it (the whole process took only a couple minutes).

Anyway, this is the file that the BDP played as if it were a standard DivX file:

FFmpeg version git-c3897d7, Copyright (c) 2000-2011 the FFmpeg developers
built on Jan 20 2011 13:56:32 with gcc 4.4.2
configuration: --enable-memalign-hack --arch=x86 --target-os=mingw32 --cross-prefix=i686-mingw32- --enable-static --disable-shared --enable-zlib --disable-ffprobe --disable-ffplay --prefix=/media/windows/ffmpeg --extra-cflags=-U__STRICT_ANSI__ --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libx264 --enable-gpl --extra-libs='-lx264 -lpthread' --enable-runtime-cpudetect
libavutil 50.36. 0 / 50.36. 0
libavcore 0.16. 1 / 0.16. 1
libavcodec 52.108. 0 / 52.108. 0
libavformat 52.94. 0 / 52.94. 0
libavdevice 52. 2. 3 / 52. 2. 3
libavfilter 1.74. 0 / 1.74. 0
libswscale 0.12. 0 / 0.12. 0

Seems stream 0 codec frame rate differs from container frame rate: 24000.00 (24000/1) -> 23.98 (24000/1001)
Input #0, avi, from 'C:\(*filename removed*)':
Duration: 01:47:49.28, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 2143 kb/s
Stream #0.0: Video: mpeg4, yuv420p, 720x464 [PAR 32:27 DAR 160:87], 23.99 fps, 23.98 tbr, 23.99 tbn, 24k tbc
At least one output file must be specified

---> DB Level Info: -99