More trouble with MKV Playback

Ok thanks, sounds like a lot of hassle for no guarantees. Maybe I will try out a different server and see if I have any more success.

Last night I tried a few different servers, none of which I like as much as serviio though.

Mediatomb: wouldn't show up on the TV
TVMOBiLi: nice interface and easy to setup. It let me browse my directories on the TV, but would not show any files in them.
PS3 Media Server: A bit more tricky to setup and I had to mod a config file to recognise my TV, but once in there it did start playback of these files. However, there was quite a bit of buffering and audio looked slightly out of sync with video. I have a bigger RAM stick that I will add to my server to see if this improves things and then there is the option of adding a GFX card to take load of the CPU. One thing I did not like about this though was the way directories were presented exactly as they are on the system and you need to browse all the way in to find your file.

So I was playing around with ffmpeg tonight and just doing some straight conversions on the MKV files. Doing this and playing the output files works perfectly on the Sony TV using serviio. Should it not be possible therefore to have ffmpeg do the transcoding live as I try to play the MKV?

The command I used to convert to mpg is:

ffmpeg -i infile.mkv -vcodec mpeg2video -crf 28 -sameq -acodec copy -f vob -copyts -threads 2 -y outfile.mpg

Only problem with this is my filesize is 2.5 times bigger on the output, any way I can squeeze this down?

[zip]

this is actually transcoding the file, not just remuxin (what Serviio does) - see -vcodec copy

this is actually transcoding the file, not just remuxin (what Serviio does) - see -vcodec copy

I see, so is it possible to get serviio to transcode during playback? Do I just need to change the profile?

[zip]

yes, you'll have to specify targetVCodec

yes, you'll have to specify targetVCodec

It worked!!

I changed the profile to always transcode to mpeg2video regardless of source and I can now playback all my media. CPU sits at around 70% when doing all this, which is pretty reasonable I think.

[Illico]

It worked!!
I changed the profile to always transcode to mpeg2video regardless of source and I can now playback all my media. CPU sits at around 70% when doing all this, which is pretty reasonable I think.

Yes it works, and yes CPU load will be high...also be careful with display aspect ratio, there are some issues with Sony TV.

Should the standard Sony profile not be modified to allow this by default?

I take it there is no problem loading my CPU to this extent as I am not really running anything else on the server while this is going on, and the playback has thus far been smooth. Might hit some problems if it was trying to do 1080 content, but none of my data is in that format at present anyway.

[zip]

Should the standard Sony profile not be modified to allow this by default?

Definitely no. I'll try to patch FFmpeg for the next version (need some test material though )

Should the standard Sony profile not be modified to allow this by default?

Definitely no. I'll try to patch FFmpeg for the next version (need some test material though )

Ok, will try and cut some tonight.

Can you explain why the profile should not be modified if the TV cannot display the format it is being sent?

[zip]

Can you explain why the profile should not be modified if the TV cannot display the format it is being sent?

It only fails FFmpeg execution, right? That's why it won't play.