Mezzmo and Pixelation of MKV Videos

[Shoulder Devil]

All,

I have purchased Mezzmo and have been working on it to get my media to stream through my Dish Network (Hopper) reciever. I have created a device profile for the hopper and it seems to be working pretty well. My biggest problem is that my AMD Athlon 64 x2 Dual Core Processor just doesn't seem to have enough power to handle the transcoding on the fly. When transcoding, I get a lot of stops and stutters, making the videos unwatchable. To get around this, I have turned off transcoding and I am working on re-encoding my videos to a format that the Hopper can play natively without transcoding.

To that end, I re-encoded a couple of my movies from .mkv (h264 video , ac3 audio) to mp4 (h264 video, aac audio). The hopper seees the reencoded movies and will play them. However, during playback there is preiodic pixelation of the video stream. I don't see any stuttering or stopping, but the video becomes so pixelated at times that you cannot even make out what is currently on screen. After a few seconds, it usualy goes away, but will then return within a few seconds. This process continues throughout the entire duration of both movies that I have tried.

To try to isolate the source of the problem, I tried streaming the same videos to a remote computer using Windows Media Player (i.e. open Media Player, navigate to the remote file share, double-click the remote video file to play it). I did not see any pixelation when streaming using this method. It only appears to be a problem when streaming to the Hopper from Mezzmo. At first, I thought that the problem may be that my PC is underpowered and cannot stream the MKV video, but the fact that I can stream to media player without pixelation is a cause for concern on my part. I also checked theresource utilization of the Mezmo server while streaming and there was no indication that the CPU, Memory, Disk or network connections were being over-taxed, which makes me think that hardware is not the issue.

The only other place left to look is within the Mezzmo Media Server service that is handling the stream before it leaves the server. Has anyone else encountered this issue when streaming MKVs without transcoding? Are there any "tweaks" that can be made to Mezzmo to improve the quality of a non-transcoded MKV data stream and get rid of the pixelation?

Thanks

James

[Paul]

Hi James,

Give you have turned transcoding off, then your Mezzmo server is streaming the file directly to your Hopper without any transcoding, etc. My guess is that your Hopper's firmware gets confused from time-to-time with the encoding of the file and that results in the pixelation that you see. You mention that streaming the same file via Mezzmo server to another PC running Windows Media Player did not result in pixelation - so this suggests that Mezzmo server streaming is fine. Windows Media Player's decoding engine is probably able to handle the file's encoding. One suggestion is to re-encode the file again with less aggressive settings (lower bitrate, etc.) and see if you see any difference.

With regards your computer not being able to transcode on-the-fly, Mezzmo does have pre-transcoding features for this specific reason. It lets you pre-transcode your files before you stream them - essentially removing the need for you to go to another program and encode them yourself (probably with different encoding settings that those that Mezzmo uses). To pre-transcode a file, right-click on the file in Mezzmo and click Pre-Transcode Files. Perhaps give that a try and see if that works.