Serviio

Hi, I've been using Serviio for some time, but more than half of my files will not play, and I've finally decided to unlazy enough to try to fix it. I have a 2012 Panasonic GT50, and I found this post here.

viewtopic.php?f=13&t=5119&start=60#p36709

I'm trying to edit in the profile, but every time I do and try to restart, whether it's booting up the PC, or simply restarting the process, serviio will not start. I'm obviously doing something wrong. I've simply copy pasting this. What am I missing?

Here is the code itself I'm using.

That profile looks like it was written for an earlier version of Serviio. While it could be brought up to date - it is functionally equivalent to the existing "Panasonic Viera E/S/ST/VT (2011)" profile, so why not use that. I presume you have tried this existing profile, if not try it (remembering to press Save after selecting it). You will need to remove the above profile from your profiles.xml file to get Serviio back up and running.

While the profile above is equivalent to the 2011 profile (which transcodes AVI files), my understanding is that the GT50 supports AVI's natively and should play them. If that is the case, the "Panasonic Viera G/GT/DT/UT/VT (2011/2012)" would be the better selection.

When you say "more than half my files can't play", what type of file are they and what do you mean by can't play (what do you actually see on the TV)? It may pay to paste a MediaInfo output for one of the files. Also, do these files play via the USB port?

I once asked a Panasonic tech support guy about the files it will play, and this is what he gave me. I don't think it supports avi over streaming, though the files it supports are different for USB.

• MP4 files (Video codec H.264 | Audio codec MP3/AC-3/LPCM)
• MKV files (Video codec H.264 | Audio codec MP3/AC-3/LPCM)
• MPEG-2 PS files*
• MPEG-2 TS files*

Does that help? Later today I will try to make a list of some specific files that play, and ones that don't. Thanks for your reply.

I have done some analysis for a similar TV which I have - ST60. This is not very different from GT50, so you might want to look at this post.
viewtopic.php?f=13&t=11274

Page 2 in that thread has a profile XML which will work for you in case you have messed up your existing profiles XML. Just replace that and try starting Serviio again (perhaps rebooting the computer is a better idea at this stage.)


In terms of what files can play, there are many more parameters. I have prepared a file with some analysis. Again, refer to my thread to download the file.

Hi. Thank you for the new profile. I did look up the thread from denyall, and tried the 2013 panasonic profile. It is better, and it actually fixes some aspect ratio problems I had with the default 2012 profile.

However, I still have 2 problems. I don't think it's always transcoding dts, because I still get files with dts audio that aren't playing. But as I'm posting this, I'm going through the profile, and I see the "uncomment if dts not natively supported" line, so I did that, so maybe that will fix it. The real problem then, is that it will not play avis. I'd like to limit the transcoding to as little as possible, so how do I do that? I've tried to mess around with this, but I've apparently messed something up because serviio won't start. I was trying to get it to remux avis into mpegts containers. And I'm not even really sure what I just said. I know just enough about this all to get me into trouble.

Anyways, any help? What would be perfect, is if someone could just give me a straight up profile to copy/paste into my config file, that would just plain work. I can even paypal a bit or something for it.

edit: So dts transcoding is working, but the quality is very poor. Very noticeably poor. I don't see it specifying a bitrate, but maybe there is a default somewhere? Would that be in ffdshow? I'm looking into this, will probably edit this again before anyone sees it.

A video media file can be thought of as containing a minimum of three elements - a video stream, an audio stream and a container to hold it all together. Remuxing is the process of simply copying the video and audio streams into a new container. So in your case remuxing would copy the video and audio (as is, without any loss of quality) from an .AVI container to a .M2TS container. Remuxing is not processor intensive.

Transcoding on the other hand changes the video and/or the audio to a new format. This will always result in some loss of quality (whether its detectable or not depends on how much loss of quality). Video transcoding is processor intensive.

wrt remuxing your AVI files. This may not work - if your TV doesn't support DivX or Xvid video encoding (commonly used in AVI's), it may not support it whether in an AVI container or any other. Anyway, give it a go - using the 2013 test profile from here: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=12367 add the following line directly under the line <Matches container="wtv" />:

<Matches container="avi" />

This will remux all avi files. If this doesn't play it means the video will need to be transcoded - come back to me if that's the case. If you find that audio only doesn't work, move this added line up under the line <Matches container="mp4" vCodec="h264" aCodec="lpcm" /> - this will now remux the video, but transcode your audio to an AC3 format. Remember to restart you Serviio service (or your PC) when you change the profile.

Thanks a bunch. So I added that line, or actually I just took out the vCodec="h264" from the existing line. You're right though, it will not play xvid. I have many of those, and it now acts like it wants to play, says "please wait a moment," then "cannot read file." So that's the next step, though I think I can figure out how to get it to transcode xvid. Somewhere in the profile, all the different variations of xvid are defined, so I assume I just copy that, then tell it to transcode anything with xvid to something else.

Also, you may have not seen my edit about dts. I did see how to get dts transcoded, but the audio quality is very poor. Is there any way to improve that?

edit: I'm going to try transcoding dts to lpcm, and see if the quality improves that way. I doubt it would, but I'm just trying out new things at this point. Again, thanks for your help. Also, I don't know what I should be transcoding the xvid to.

Ok, so I've figured out the audio quality thing. I've set aBitrate="384", as it is in other profiles. The audio is much, much better. About that though, can I go any higher, or is that about the max that you can take audio? Also, that means overall right? So it could be 6 channels at 64 each, as opposed to the default 192, or 32 per channel? Does that always apply, as in both stereo audio tracks and 6 channel would be transcoded at 384?

edit: Nevermind, I've tried 768, no noticeable difference in quality, but it plays, so I'll just leave that. You should really consider making 384 the default bitrate for transcoding. It's night and day.

So basically now, all it is is the avis that use xvid, which is alot of what I have. I don't understand how this isn't telling it to transcode however, you already have this. But maybe I'm just stupid. In fact, that's probably the case because it isn't working.



Anyways I'll wait for your next reply. Thanks.

edit: New problem. On mkvs, the aspect ratio is wrong, and my tv cannot fix it by changing the aspect ratio for some reason. I added dar="16:9" to the mkv remux/transcode of dts, but the video becomes choppy, audio cuts out. If I want to fix the aspect ratio, will I have to transcode mkvs as well?

No, in fact quite the opposite. What I have is transcoding DivX and letting Xvid through (the ST60 can handle XVids but not DivX - suspect Panasonic don't want to pay the licence fee). To transcode both DivX and XVid, then change line:

<Matches container="avi" vCodec="mpeg4" vFourCC="div3,div4,div5,divx,dm4v,dx50" /> to <Matches container="avi" />

and remove the line after that. This will then transcode all AVI's. ps. make sure you remove the AVI line you added in the previous post otherwise it will never get to this part of the profile.

My understanding was that if the aBitrate was not specified, it would transcode at the same bit rate as the source. I can't remember now how I came to that understanding (and when I think it thru it doesn't make sense) so I'll look into this. Do you know what bit rate it transcoded to without the aBitrate command?

I believe the maximum bit rate for AC3 is 640kbps. However, a lot of equipment is incompatible with 640 and most people will be hard pressed to tell the difference between 640 and 384 anyway, so 384 is a good choice. Also my understanding is in AC-3 the bit rate is not shared equally by each channel, its dynamically allocated amongst channels, so 384k isn't 64k per channel.

Ah, my pet problem. On Panasonics (I'm not sure if this is a Panasonic or generic issue) as soon as you transcode OR remux you seem to lose aspect ratio information. See my post here: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=12655&p=77185&hilit=aspect+ratio#p77109

The only way to overcome this is to transcode the video and adding the DAR="16:9" command. This will mean deleting the two existing lines with the aCodec="dca" and adding a new section:

Unfortunately this will transcode all MKV and MP4 files with DTS audio - you only really need to do it if the source aspect ratio is > 16:9, but there is no way to check for that. You will still not have any real options to change the aspect ratio from the TV remote, and your TV will think its a 4:3 video, but it should look OK on the screen. ps. were your AVI's the correct aspect ratio after transcoding? If not, you may have to move the AVI line to this section.

I will do that. I didn't even know there was a difference between xvid and divx. I'm an idiot.

As far as abitrate goes, the wiki states that the default is 192 unless specified. And from my ears listening, that seems to be accurate. By default, the sound was rather poor, as in noticeably lossy, but when I specified 384, that made it incredibly much better. I only listened to a little, but there was no huge, or to me, as a professional violinist, there was no noticeable difference between 384 and 768, just with a single listen to both, back to back. I feel that 384 is probably what you want.

Also, the idea that AC3 is dynamically distributing the bitrate makes alot of sense. Loud, full channel, fully saturated passages of music or movies don't need to be super good quality, as much as the quiet, intricate passages need alot of definition. That probably explains why alot of explosions, even in cheap theatres, give alot of distortion.

I will say this about aspect ratio. When I don't have the dar command added, the Panasonic gives me 3 choices. Original, aspect 1, and aspect 2. Aspect 1 just essentially fits to screen whatever original is, and aspect 2 does nothing. I suspected it was Panasonic's problem. However when I do add the dar command to mkv files, I get the same thing in original, but aspect 1 gives me the correct aspect. However, I get maybe 7-8 seconds of perfect bliss, then audio stutters, video becomes choppy, then audio drops out entirely. Sometimes, after about 25-30 seconds, I get another 7-8 seconds of perfect video/audio, then the same thing happens.

If I didn't know better, I'd say it was just that my computer resources weren't up to the task, and it's not like I know better, but I really doubt that's the case. I doubt that helps you if you're aware of the problem, but I was just trying to let you know what happens with my set. I suspect that it must have to do with

Anyways I'll try transcoding all this, and either way, I'll reply back. Thank you so much for your help.

Thanks for the info re: default bit rate, saves me looking it up. Also, its interesting to know that a professional musician couldn't discern a noticeable difference. This corresponds to what I read on the web as well.

You're getting good at this This is likely exactly the case - when you put DAR="16:9" into the line previously, Serviio needs to transcode the video. Without any other instruction it will transcode the video in its current format - in this case h264. All video coding is processor intensive - but h264 is the current grand daddy of them all - it requires some serious processing power.

What I have given you will still transcode the video, but this time to mpeg2 video. Still chews some processing power, but nowhere near as intensive as h264 encoding (most modern PC's with a couple of cores will handle mpeg encoding without any real issues). For on-the-fly transcoding there is no advantage of using h264 over mpeg2 (h264's advantage is it gives the same quality for smaller file size - for on-the-fly transcoding we don't care about file size as we are not saving the file).

As regards to XVID, I would suggest have a look at this thread. viewtopic.php?f=13&t=11274
I have some posts where I had issues with AVI and XVID on ST60.

Edit: In particular for AVI's to work, put this.

So just about everything is working. On some very old avis, the audio is pretty badly out of sync, and on one of my mp4s for some reason, the video isn't transcoding. But those seem to be pretty isolated issues, and I'm sure some files are a little messed up for whatever reason. Just so you can see if I did anything wrong, here's the video part of the profile.

You could always try removing the audio transcoding for your AVI's and see if that fixes the audio sync problems (most AVI's have AC3 or MP3 audio anyway, which your TV likely plays fine). Remove the targetACodec="ac3" aBitrate="384" bits in the transcode command directly above the AVI line.

For the MP4 file you will need to post some MediaInfo details so we can see what codecs it uses.

Ok, well as I test more I'm running into more problems. Here's what I'm trying to do now, and I think this should be the right order.

Transcode all avi video, leave audio alone
Transcode all divx, flv video/audio with unsupported audio
Transcode all dvix, flv video only, if supported audio
Transcode all mkv video/audio with unsupported audio
Transcode all mkv video only, if supported audio
Transcode all mp4 audio only, if audio unsupported

I'm going to try that out. I hope the logic in it works, and it should cut down on any sort of transcoding that doesn't need to happen. Reason I'm doing this is because one of the mkv files I'm trying to play has ac3 audio already, and when I try to transcode the audio, it's stuttering.

One question. If my TV will support h264, will it always also support h263? Right now I have it transcoding h263, but I was wondering if h263 was by default supported on anything that supported h264.

edit: This is not working. Maybe I messed something up, or can you not give to different commands to the same type of file, even if you're specifying one part firs, then addressing the rest of it later?

No.
You can (if I follow what you are trying to do), but you need to pay attention to the order. Serviio will act on the first rule that matches. Let's have a look at what you have done.

I got frustrated, so I just went back to yours for a while. This is what I've done though, at least the relevant part.

What's not working? ps. I think the last </Video> needs to be commented out.

Again, sorry for the delay. Serviio will not start if this is in the profile xml. I watch it in task manager as I try to start it; memory/cpu always spikes as I guess it's reading all the profiles, then either the process ends itself, or it flatlines and works. I can only guess that means that somewhere in the code, there's some sort of mistake that it cannot deal with.

XML Error should be explained in the DEBUG log.