Evaluating Mezzmo - Won't play avi movie

[harry_fine]

Hello Everyone.

My first post. I'm having trouble with Mezzmo, downloaded it yesterday and bought a WDTV Live yesterday. Everything installed and hooked up great.

Have all my media on a new Clie drive connected by Firewire. Everything indexed in Mezzmo.

The movie I'm playing is an AVI file. When I go into the ATI menus and select the Mezzmo media service, I see the video, click on it, but tells me that it's the wrong format and to check the supported file formats in the manual.

I thought the beauty of having Mezzmo (so I was told here on this forum prior to download it) was that it transcodes on the fly so I can play file formats that my DNLA client does not natively support.

Weirder still, when I browse to the file using the media shares on the WDTV Live, it plays the AVI file, albeit without music (haven't figured out why yet).

So playing the AVI file off the Mezzmo server is actually worse than not having it at all.

Any ideas?


Thank you

Harry Fine

[GMAN]

I had this problem with an AVI file. The file may be damaged. I found a free utility on sourceforge called DivFix++. It repairs avi files, be sure to make a backup of the file first if you use it. It fixed my problem. You can download the 32-bit version or if you have 64-bit windows, the 64-bit version.

http://divfixpp.sourceforge.net/download.php

Gerald

[harry_fine]

Thanks Gerald, but it doesn't work. Ran both my .avi files through DivFix++. It created 2, duplicate files, same size exactly. Ran those through Medial Player. Worked great. Ran them on the WD box as a Windows share. Worked great. Tried to run them through the Mezzmo media server on the WD box. Same error message about format. Didn't recognize the format, and file size shown on screen was 0.

For me, Mezzmo is junk if it won't play movied.

Thanks

Harry

[RMerlin]

There must be something particular about that file and the codecs it uses, as Mezzmo has no problem sending my Xvid AVIs to my own WDTV Live. Chances are it's using a codec that is not correctly handled by ffmpeg (the part of Mezzmo that takes care of analyzing, detecting codecs, and transcoding when necessary).

We will need more information to be able to help you resolve your issue. Right-click on the file that doesn't work from inside Mezzmo, and select "Get FFMPEG information". Then please post the info back here.

[harry_fine]

I'm not sure why Mezzmo would do anything to the file since the WD TV seems perfectly capable of playing it since it works fine when I browse to the share. Anyway, here's what it says:


FFmpeg version SVN-r24894, Copyright (c) 2000-2010 the FFmpeg developers
built on Aug 24 2010 15:03:07 with gcc 4.4.0
configuration: --enable-static --disable-shared --enable-memalign-hack --enable-libmp3lame --extra-cflags=-I/c/msys/local/include --extra-ldflags=-L/c/msys/local/lib --enable-zlib --enable-w32threads --extra-cflags=-fno-common --enable-gpl --enable-libx264 --disable-ffplay --disable-ffprobe --disable-ffserver --enable-runtime-cpudetect --extra-cflags=-U__STRICT_ANSI__
libavutil 50.24. 0 / 50.24. 0
libavcore 0. 6. 0 / 0. 6. 0
libavcodec 52.86. 1 / 52.86. 1
libavformat 52.78. 3 / 52.78. 3
libavdevice 52. 2. 1 / 52. 2. 1
libavfilter 1.37. 0 / 1.37. 0
libswscale 0.11. 0 / 0.11. 0

Seems stream 0 codec frame rate differs from container frame rate: 23.98 (65535/2733) -> 23.98 (2997/125)
Input #0, avi, from 'M:\Movies\Frost-Nixon\Frost_Nixon_1.avi':
Metadata:
ISFT : VirtualDubMod 1.5.10.2 (build 2540/release)
Duration: 00:56:09.95, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 1740 kb/s
Stream #0.0: Video: mpeg4, yuv420p, 640x272 [PAR 1:1 DAR 40:17], 23.98 tbr, 23.98 tbn, 23.98 tbc
Stream #0.1: Audio: ac3, 48000 Hz, 5.1, s16, 448 kb/s
At least one output file must be specified

[RMerlin]

I'm not sure why Mezzmo would do anything to the file since the WD TV seems perfectly capable of playing it since it works fine when I browse to the share.

This can happen if Mezzmo either fails to properly recognize the codecs used, or if the codec combination that is used isn't defined in its device profile. In that case someone from Conceiva might need to send you a tweaked device profile file to resolve the issue. They are usually doing an awesome job at this.

Seems stream 0 codec frame rate differs from container frame rate: 23.98 (65535/2733) -> 23.98 (2997/125)
Input #0, avi, from 'M:\Movies\Frost-Nixon\Frost_Nixon_1.avi':
Metadata:
ISFT : VirtualDubMod 1.5.10.2 (build 2540/release)
Duration: 00:56:09.95, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 1740 kb/s
Stream #0.0: Video: mpeg4, yuv420p, 640x272 [PAR 1:1 DAR 40:17], 23.98 tbr, 23.98 tbn, 23.98 tbc
Stream #0.1: Audio: ac3, 48000 Hz, 5.1, s16, 448 kb/s
At least one output file must be specified

I suspect the device profile doesn't know how to handle the Xvid and AC3 combination here when inside an AVI container (I'm assuming Xvid is the mpeg4 codec used here - there is a variety of mpeg4-compliant codecs). Hang on, someone from Conceiva should be able to get back to you on Monday, and will let you know if they either need more detailed debug logs or if a simple device profile update would get you up and running with those files.

[harry_fine]

Thank you.

[Paul]

Yes, that combination is not in the device profile. Please send a message to support (at) conceiva (dot) com and I'll send you an updated device profile to try.

Also, please go to Media Devices dialog in Mezzmo (if you haven't already) and make sure that "WD TV Live" is selected as your device, because by default it's picked up as a DLink DSM-750.

[RMerlin]

Dennis/Paul, is there a reason why combinations that aren't in the device profile aren't just transcoded to the device preferred format/container? It seems to me profile maintenance would be far simpler if formats that aren't specifically supported were simply transcoded - there would be a lot less profile tweaking involved. Or, is that configurable on the Advanced tab in the Device Settings options?

Regarding the DSM-750 reference: having dug around the WDTV Live firmware, I've seen at least one or two references to a DLink device in there. I found that... interesting.

[Paul]

Any combinations that aren't in the device profile are in fact transcoded to the preferred one. Provided of course transcoding hasn't been turned off (and Advanced options haven't been tweaked to disable it) and FFmpeg doesn't crash somewhere during transcoding Of course it's best not to transcode at all, thus the constant updates to device profiles to support more and more native formats.

I don't mind WD TV Live sharing DLink's base source for their own firmware, but one would've thought that they'd at least change the user-agent strings