Downmixing 5.1 to Stereo, Samsung BDP-C6900

[OverFienD]

Hi there,

Loving Mezzmo, and am just wanting to get one issue sorted before purchasing (using trial)..

Here's the equipment...

HTPC, i3, 4 GB RAM - first floor
Samsung BDP-C6900 bluray - 2nd floor
Wireless N router (only wireless G from the HTPC) - 1st floor

Have got Mezzmo profile set to BDP, and connection via Wireless A/B/G, transcode quality to low/fast.

Now SD content streams perfectly, and some 720 content is fine, but most 720 and 1080 is choppy (for obvious reasons).

What I'm wondering is if there is any way to force downmix to 2 chan stereo, to help reduce the overall bitrate of the Transcoded stream?

If not that, perhaps there is another easy way to reduce the stream size, to assist with wireless streaming.

Thanks in advance for any help!

[Paul]

Wireless G will be the slow segment in your home network and that will most likely be the cause of all your stuttering/choppy playback.

You can contact us at support [at] conceiva [dot] com and we can provide you with a test device profile that downmixes to 2 channel audio.

Another thing to try is to pre-transcode your files before streaming them. That way, you can test different formats to see what streams best to your devices on your home network. Right-click on a file and click 'Pre-transcode File'. Once a file has been pre-transcoded (see Transcoding pane for status), then it can be streamed to your device. You can see what formats a file has been transcoded to by right-clicking on the file and clicking Properties menu item.

[OverFienD]

Hi Paul,

Thanks for the send of the updated profile. I have done a little testing before using the update:

- Transcoding is at 5 to 15 fps, which an obvious bottleneck!
- Changed profile to 'Samsung BDP 3D', and have seen an improve to 25fps transcoding. I have i3 530 w/ 4Gb RAM (uses about 2Gb when transcoding)
- A pretranscoded 1080p MKV will run without stutter over wireless G upstairs. But some 720p TV content will play stuttered every 10 secs to a minute (although the transcoding pane doesn't indicate that it is transcoding the file).

I suspect that my problems will be a little bit of both (transcoding and network throughput), but will do a little more testing over the weekend to see if I can 'tweak' it to work!

Is there any reason not to attemp to use the different 'Samsung' profiles to get a better result?

Thanks. OFD

[Paul]

I suspect that my problems will be a little bit of both (transcoding and network throughput), but will do a little more testing over the weekend to see if I can 'tweak' it to work!

I think you are right.

Is there any reason not to attemp to use the different 'Samsung' profiles to get a better result?

It is perfectly fine to try the various Samsung device profiles and find the one that fits best your collection of files, computer performance and home network bandwidth.

[OverFienD]

Hi Again!

Have updated to wireless n all round, and now any compatible 1280x720 file or lower will play no problems.

1080p struggles, which I suppose you would expect over wireless. My problem is that if I set the profile to max 1080i (1280x720), Im transcoding at about 20-25fps (max 30), which is obviously too slow for on the fly transcoding.

I'm still mucking about with the profiles, transcoding quality etc, to see if I can't tweak it to get an acceptable result.

Will additional RAM assist with transcoding, or is it purely CPU grunt? I notice when transcoding that CPU is running about 95-100% (ffmpeg at about 90-95%), but physical mem is about 40-50%.

Thanks for the help.

[Paul]

It's down to your CPU now - ideally you'd want an i7 (4 cores, 8 threads) for real-time 1080p transcoding. The i3 530 has 4 threads, so FFmpeg can use 3 and the server one. If you're not streaming at the same time, then FFmpeg should be able to use 4 threads, so pre-transcoding the file should be a bit faster than transcoding and streaming.