Movie doesn't play.

[Paul]

Hi Dennis,
What command line option are you using to dump file info with ffmpeg.exe?

Hi,

Sorry, what do you mean? When we process files to get information to store in the database? If yes, then we don't use ffmpeg.exe for that - we use DLLs directly.

Did you find that after a certain number of refframes video doesn't play?

[Josip]

In the past you have asked me to right click on a video file in Mezzmo and click on "Get FFmpeg Information" I was trying to see if i can gather the information the same way with using a command line option in FFmpeg.exe. I wanted to see if I could output more info about a video file. I noticed the default info from "Get FFmpeg Information" doesn't tell you the "ReFrames" number from the video file. I used a program called MediaInfo which is excellent. It gives you everything you need to know about a movie file.

Maybe a suggestion to use MediaInfo for Mezzmo to gather information as it gives a lot more info that is important.

After a lot of testing I found out that the ReFrames in association with Resolution is more important than checking what profile the h.264 file is.

Samsung C Series
Resolution - Reframes
1920x1080 - 6
1920x1040 - 6
1920x816 - 9
1920x800 - 9
1448x1080 - 6
1280x720 - 11
1280x640 - Need to test
1280x560 - Need to test
1280x544 - Need to test
1280x536 -15
960x720 - 11
720x576 - 16 but stutters

Any h.264 video streams with ReFrames higher than than whats listed above will display "Video Codec Not Supported"

Blu-Ray movies are encoded at a standard of Hight@Profile4.1 at Reframes 4 at 1080p
I have come across a lot of my movies where the ripper has chosen to use non standard settings such at High@Profile5.1 with Reframes up to 16 at 1920x1080.

Having movies at High@Profile5.1 does not matter as this Profile can handle up to 300mbit bitrate video which no blu-rays go beyond the 4.1 standard of 62.5mbit. It's the ReFrames that cause the issue.

There is a tool that can change the profile from 5.1 to 4.1 without encoding but this doesn't make any difference. To change the ReFrames number you have to re-encode the movie to a lower number.

Each media player would have its own boundaries with the limit of ReFrames it can handle. Which depending on the processor speed and memory.

It would be nice to have Mezzmo check what resolution and ReFrames the movie is and if its past the hardware limit of the player then it will Transcode the movie to the right settings for the unit.

Cheers.

[Paul]

The internal functions in DLLs that we use should allow us to gather the number of reframes - FFmpeg output is limited, compared to what we get internally. We are not storing/using that information yet, but it's all coming soon.

The profile levels actually specify limits on the reframes, so they are still useful: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC - of course the problem is when people start doing non-standard stuff, hoping that software players will adjust (and they do in most cases). The hardware players are of course less flexible and thus we have this issue.

When Mezzmo needs to change the profile level, we do full transcoding as well, since as you've noted, it's not enough to simply fool a device into thinking the file is of certain characteristics.

Basically, I think it comes down to us storing reframes for the file and then using that in addition to profile level to make sure the file is as per the spec and if it's not, then we transcode to make it adhere to the spec.