[FFmpeg-user] ProRes Quicktimes with audio not playing back reliably

[Thomas Worth]

On Sat, Sep 22, 2012 at 1:04 PM, Bob Maple <bobm-ffmpeg at burner.com> wrote:
> Experimenting with ffmpeg for Prores Quicktime creation on Windows so I can
> stop having to bounce stuff over to a Mac to do it, but am having some
> issues with the resulting files.
>
> Upon a bunch of testing, it seems that the movies made with video AND audio
> are problematic;  If I make a video-only Prores Quicktime it plays back just
> fine, or if I make an audio only it plays back fine as well.
>
> With both however I get unreliable playback, ranging from Quicktime Player
> (on Windows) playing back 'lurchy' or even freezing up entirely.  It's also
> not consistent;  It will play through sections fine one time and freeze up
> another, so it's not happening at exactly the same spot. Sometimes I'll get
> 2 seconds in and it freezes, sometimes it'll go for 20-30 and then die.
>
> So this seems like a muxing/interleaving issue with the video and audio
> ffmpeg is writing in such a way that Quicktime Player is getting a bit
> twisted up inside.  If I take for instance the separate video-only Prores
> and audio from ffmpeg and combine them myself in Quicktime Pro (using Copy
> from the audio movie and 'Add to Movie' on the video one) and save a new
> self-contained file, it plays back fine.
>
> I've been searching through the list archives and the cloest thing I can
> find is:
>
>  http://ffmpeg.org/pipermail/ffmpeg-user/2012-May/006612.html
>
> However the FCP warning is not (yet) my problem since I can't even get them
> to work reliably on Windows, AND I've made >4GB files that still don't work.
> But that thread suggested some sort of muxing problem that was supposedly
> fixed in the ffmbc fork, but I downloaded and tried that too and didn't have
> any better success - the movies behave the exact same way.  So I'm not sure
> what might be going on.

Is this also a problem when you transcode the same media to something
other than ProRes, like JPEG (-vcodec mjpeg)? Or does the problem ONLY
occur with ProRes-encoded files?

Can you send me one of your ProRes files that exhibits this problem?
I'd like to have a look. You can email me off-list to get the details.