Certain MKVs not working

[slampt]

Hey all, not sure if anyone can help here (this is a xine issue I think).
I have some mkvs (legacy) from when I used another media platform. However I can not seem to get them to play with Xine.
The error I get is
ebml: read error

If I crank up KDE desktop I can get it to work under Mplayer, unfortunately the little trick of renaming it to *.evo doesn't seem to work under 810 anymore. Anyone with xine clue able to lend a hand?

Thanks
Slampt

[Nuwis]

Hi

I´m playing without problems mkv videos including 1080p videos in some MD with a good video card (Nvidia 9 series or higher), but in some cases it is imposible to play more than 720 due hardware limitations. In resume if the video is 1080p and not supported by hardaware you get errors, but it doesn´t mean that you cannot play 720p videos in the same mkv container with the same hardaware.

[colinjones]

Have you tried renaming the file to .m2ts and changing its meta data type to LMCE Bluray Disc... this will cause mplayer to play it instead... although you won't be able to pause, rewind, etc.

Nuwis - a "good video card" shouldn't make the slightest difference unless you are using VDPAU for hardware acceleration....

[totallymaxed]

Nuwis - a "good video card" shouldn't make the slightest difference unless you are using VDPAU for hardware acceleration....

Well... thats not totally correct. Our tests show that with HD h.264 content their is some considerable performance gain to be had, even before VDPAU is enabled, by using 9000 series nVidia card or above over a say a 7000 and most 8000 series cards.

Andrew

[colinjones]

Well I don't see how! The GPU isn't involved one little bit in the decoding without VDPAU - I can only assume that it is the OpenGL component when the frames are rendered to the screen after decoding... that would seem only to be relevant for one of the UI2 modes, but I suppose there could be other rendering improvements from 9000 series even in UI1.. perhaps just the way it draws to a window, clips, blits etc? Either way, it isn't related to decoding the stream and so the codec isn't really relevant, its just pure number of pixels due to screen resolution.... no?

[totallymaxed]

Well I don't see how! The GPU isn't involved one little bit in the decoding without VDPAU - I can only assume that it is the OpenGL component when the frames are rendered to the screen after decoding... that would seem only to be relevant for one of the UI2 modes, but I suppose there could be other rendering improvements from 9000 series even in UI1.. perhaps just the way it draws to a window, clips, blits etc? Either way, it isn't related to decoding the stream and so the codec isn't really relevant, its just pure number of pixels due to screen resolution.... no?

Do the tests yourself Colin. I agree that the GPU is not helping with the h.264 decoding...but it does accelerate many other rendering and display related tasks and therefore offloads those from the CPU... the overall effect of these cards, even without VDPAU, is marked and for the extra money well worth having as a performance gain for your system.

All the best

Andrew 

[slampt]

Have you tried renaming the file to .m2ts and changing its meta data type to LinuxMCE Bluray Disc... this will cause mplayer to play it instead... although you won't be able to pause, rewind, etc.

Sorry for the delay Colin, I have tried the above, this trick used to work for me in 0710, but I haven't been able to get it to work in 0810.
I will have to investigate more, I don't think mplayer is actually getting called when I try this.
ATM I am just jumping into KDE desktop and running mplayer from the cli (the the mkvs work when I do this)

Slampt

[davegravy]

I'm having the same problem. I noticed a bug report in Trac mentioning this

http://trac.linuxmce.org/trac.cgi/ticket/357

[totallymaxed]

Have you tried renaming the file to .m2ts and changing its meta data type to LinuxMCE Bluray Disc... this will cause mplayer to play it instead... although you won't be able to pause, rewind, etc.

Sorry for the delay Colin, I have tried the above, this trick used to work for me in 0710, but I haven't been able to get it to work in 0810.
I will have to investigate more, I don't think mplayer is actually getting called when I try this.
ATM I am just jumping into KDE desktop and running mplayer from the cli (the the mkvs work when I do this)

Slampt

I suspect that the m2ts file type is not in the table that validates supported types.

Andrew

[colinjones]

slampt - if you run top on the machine whilst it is playing you might see mplayer or xine player popup long enough to identify which it is....


andrew - I think the file type associations in pluto_main mediatype only relate to whether Updatemedia scans them in and if so as which media type. When they actually get played, I think it is the media type that selects the player (a guess). The fact that you have to manually select the media type as LMCE Blu-ray Disc (as well as change the file type to m2ts) selects mplayer, you choose m2ts as this is still an accepted ile type for UM, albeit that it would ordinarily be classified as LMCE Vide File, but mplayer knows how to deal with it anyway when it is sent to it. So you are kind of fooling the system into using mplayer, and then it knows how to do m2ts (kind of like the old M$ MIME execution vulnerabilities!)

just a guess tho....

but m2ts is definitely in the list for 0710

[klanmce]

Hi guys.

I also having difficulties playing certain mkv files in 810 beta, there would just be a blank screen. Created an HD folder and tagged the files using linuxmce Blueray ..., and seeing an error in myplayer log saying, myplayer not initialized. A top will show myplayer attempts to start and then stop. Myplayer works fine from kde though.