Serviio

Hi,

the title says it all : I can't get transcoding to work on my Samsung UE46B TV. Whatever I activate a profile that forces transcoding, all my video files are in error on the TV with a "unknown file format" message. I've tried standard profiles, hacking a profile, whatever, unknown file format. Playing the same files without transcoding works great.

What information are needed here so that we can see what's wrong ?

So why do you need to transcode the file when it plays great without it?

Because the TV doesn't support all the codecs, so I often need to pre-transcode them with mediacoder.

You have to provide some example of what you're trying to do, otherwise we cannot help you.

Ok, say I have a video file that is encoded with DivX 5.0.2.
As is, the file can't be played on the TV because of "unsopported video codec".

I can :

1) convert it on my PC to Xvid, share the converted file with Serviio (without activating transcoding), it plays fine on the TV

2) try to use serviio's transcoding feature to automatically transcode it to something my TV understands. When I try this, no matter what target transcoding I try, it results in "unknown file format" on the TV. I've tried for example <Video targetContainer="mpegts" targetACodec="ac3" targetVCodec="mpeg2video"> in forcing C-series default profile, I've tried forcing to PS3 profile, to create my own, whatever : as soon as Serviio transcode it, to whatever option is available on Serviio, it becomes "unknown file format".

Note that my TV doesn't complain about an unsupported video codec or audio codec. It just can't recognize anything if it has been transcoded by Serviio.

As another example, if a .avi has an audio codec my TV doesn't like, it'll still plays the video part of the avi. If I activate transcoding, I get the "unknown file format", and nothing works, neither audio nor video, so it's not that the target codec isn't the good one, it looks like the whole resulting video stream is unrecognizable by the TV.

Is it clearer ?

provide detailed log please (when you try to play the file)

Here is debug logs of a session where i tried to play a video file with samsung wiselink profile :

It looks like:

1) you tried to play a file that doesn't need to be transcoded (ie no transcoding has been invoked)
2) you selected Samsung A-series profile, but you have Samsung B-series TV.

Here is the debug logs of a .mkv with B series profile. Result : unknown file format.

this particular file is mkv with h264 video and aac audio. That is normally supported by the TV and therefore no transcoding is executed. Having said that, the TV is also extremely picky and I have some files like this that it fails to play.

You could update your profiles.xml to transcode this file type as well (rewrap it into mpeg2ts)

Can you post specific instructions on how to force transcoding for all files? I have many Handbrake encoded .m4v files, many of which will play fine on my Samsung B series but many will error out. I can't figure out what is different about these error files as they are encoded with same handbrake settings. If I could just bypass this step and use Serviio to transcode all files to the proper B-series format that would take care of the problem.
Thanks!
Brian

EDIT: I set-up Serviio to serve Samsung A-series (even though I have B-series TVs) and everything seems to work great! The files that were erroring out now play successfully. I will continue to test and report back. Thanks!