Serviio

Hello.

I've been running Serviio 1.0.1 for several months on a Win7 x64 machine and playing all kinds of videos pretty well on my Panasonic TC-P50UT50. However, since I was having a problem with some videos skipping or stopping before the end of the video, I decided to upgrade to Serviio 1.1, hoping that issue was fixed.

Unfortunately, since upgrading, all of my videos now exhibit a syncing problem between the video and audio when watched on my Panasonic. The audio seems to always be a little faster than the video and videos are basically unwatchable there. When I watch the videos on the Win7 PC they are synced fine though. I then downgraded (on Windows) by uninstalling 1.1 completely and after rebooting re-installed 1.0.1, but still the syncing problem was there, so I was quite confused. Incidentally, I have been using the huyz profile for transcoding and it was originally working fine under 1.0.1. The profile is attached.

I decided to build a separate Ubuntu VM and install Serviio there to see if maybe there was a problem with my Win7 box. I installed Ubuntu 12.04.1 and followed the very well written wiki here, http://wiki.serviio.org/doku.php?id=build_ffmpeg_linux, to compile and install ffmpeg and all of it's dependencies. I then installed and ran serviio.sh and the serviio-console.sh and selected the huyz profile (which I had manually inserted into profile.xml). Surprisingly, the same exact sync issue still occurred. So now, I am convinced I have either somehow screwed up the profile that was working, or Serviio 1.1 introduced a problem (bug?) which makes the transcoding not sync video and audio for my setup.

Can I download the previous Linux 1.0.1 version please so I can try that?

If anyone has any insights into what my audio/video syncing problem is caused by, please let me know. I'm going a little nuts not being able to watch my videos on my TV anymore. Does the profile look okay?

Thanks!

Also, here is the output of "ffmpeg -i <file>" for an example video:

pvut@ubu12:/win/vid/TV/Seinfeld/S3$ ffmpeg -i "018 - The Note - [DVD].avi"
ffmpeg version N-42368-gbf53863 Copyright (c) 2000-2012 the FFmpeg developers
built on Jan 24 2013 22:40:31 with gcc 4.6.3
configuration: --enable-gpl --enable-libfaac --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libopencore-amrnb --enable-libopencore-amrwb --enable-libtheora --enable-libvorbis --enable-libx264 --enable-nonfree --enable-postproc --enable-version3 --enable-x11grab --enable-libvpx --enable-librtmp --enable-libxvid
libavutil 51. 64.100 / 51. 64.100
libavcodec 54. 33.100 / 54. 33.100
libavformat 54. 15.102 / 54. 15.102
libavdevice 54. 1.100 / 54. 1.100
libavfilter 3. 1.100 / 3. 1.100
libswscale 2. 1.100 / 2. 1.100
libswresample 0. 15.100 / 0. 15.100
libpostproc 52. 0.100 / 52. 0.100
[mp3 @ 0x96f7120] Header missing
[mpeg4 @ 0x96f66e0] Invalid and inefficient vfw-avi packed B frames detected
Input #0, avi, from '018 - The Note - [DVD].avi':
Metadata:
encoder : Nandub v1.0rc2
Duration: 00:21:34.36, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 1134 kb/s
Stream #0:0: Video: mpeg4 (Advanced Simple Profile) (XVID / 0x44495658), yuv420p, 576x432 [SAR 1:1 DAR 4:3], 25 tbr, 25 tbn, 25 tbc
Stream #0:1: Audio: mp3 (U[0][0][0] / 0x0055), 48000 Hz, stereo, s16, 96 kb/s
At least one output file must be specified

didn't you say that after downgrading to 1.0.1 on Windows the out-of-sync still occurred? If yes, that would mean there is no difference in Serviio core. Did you upgrade the TV's firmware? Could the quality of your network become worse?

Hi Zip,

Thanks so much for the reply!
You are correct. After a bunch more testing I'm also convinced the problem is not with Serviio core itself, but rather the transcoding (for certain files). After testing a few different file types I noticed a lot of my newer files do play fine, but some of my older AVI files (for example) are having the syncing issue. I've read some of the transcoding tips in various forum threads and have made some small modifications to the profile, but so far I haven't been able to solve the sync issue. It is specifically affecting all the files I have for two different shows. Here is the ffprobe output for two example files where the video and audio is off by a second or two:



The current version of the profile I am using is here:



I added this line <Matches container="avi" vCodec="mpeg4" vFourCC="xvid" /> to try and force XVID videos, such as the two video examples above, to transcode to mpeg2-ts, and my TV does in fact show MPEG2-TS next to those files when viewing them. I think there may be something wrong with the audio transcoding somehow, but I don't know enough about transcoding yet to really understand the issue. The audio actually sounds fine, it's just not synchronized with the video.

Do you agree this is a transcoding issue, and if so, do you have any suggestions on how I could fix my profile?

Thanks very much!

Also, to answer your questions, nothing has changed on my home network. As far as I can tell, everything is working fine with regard to network reliability and bandwidth. I also have not upgraded the firmware on the TV and have the auto-check-for-updates feature disabled on my TV. For now, I'm sticking with running Serviio on my Ubuntu 12.04.1 machine.

In case it is helpful, I will also post the MediaInfo output for those two example files I referenced above:





I also have enabled DEBUG logging so could provide log samples if that is helpful too.

Thanks again for your assistance!

I solved the audio/video sync problem. The issue was that after I upgraded to Serviio version 1.1, I failed to replicate the perl hack described here viewtopic.php?f=7&t=5091&hilit=huyz to convert 25 fps to 29.97 fps. Once I implemented that change, my videos now play with the audio sync'd.

I am wondering how to implement the same hack on Serviio running on Linux though, as I'd prefer to run Serviio on that OS.

I have the same problem with some .mp4 files on my UT50...
I'm not really experienced with scripting etc but i tried to apply the hack but it doesn't solve my problem.

Any way to check if the hack worked? How too see if it changed to 29 fps?
Or is it possible to correct the audio manually? (would be nice by remote)