[FFmpeg-user] Converted DVDs in .mkv format lose Pause, FastForward, Skip, etc functions when I restream as mpeg to DLNA

[jen142 at promessage.com]

Hi,

My video collection was converted from DVDs onto my hard drive with
Handbrake, which uses ffmpeg.

It was a real "adventure" figuring it out but finally it works great!

Now on the drive all my videos are in "Matroska" .mkv format.

When I play them in a player like VLC or XBMC on a PC they play
perfectly, both audio and video.  All the functions like "Pause", "Fast
Forward", "Rewind", "Chapter Skip" all work OK.

In my house I have two TVs connected to BluRay player, one Sony and one
Panasonic, that have "DLNA renderers" built in.

I setup a "Mediatomb" DLNA server to get the videos onto my TVs.  At
first I could see folders but not the videos.  After a while I learned
that "mkv" is not supported by DLNA, and that I had to "transcode" the
videos.  Or it could be "remuxing".  I'm just confused about how to tell
really.

In the Mediatomb application I can do the transcode by piping it through
ffmpeg again, in real time.

The command is in a script and it looks like this:

exec ffmpeg -i $1 -vcodec mpeg2video -b 4096k -r 25 -acodec copy -f
mpegts - > $2

After doing that I can now get PERFECT! audio and video to display on my
TVs through the DLNA renderer builtin the Bluray players.

The only problem is that even though on the TV I see the popup for the
"Pause", "Fast Forward", "Rewind", "Chapter Skip", and when I press the
buttons on my remote I see those controls highlight on the screen, the
functions don't work anymore.  I can only start & completely stop the
video - none of the other functions.

I found lots of threads in various locations that talk about the missing
"Fast Forward" etc functions, for example these

https://trac.ffmpeg.org/ticket/2330
http://www.videoredo.net/msgBoard/archive/index.php/t-31105.html
http://forum.videohelp.com/threads/352097-After-remux-with-MKVMerge-to-add-subs-scanning-is-slow?p=2212090&viewfull=1#post2212090

But I don't understand from them what to really do to get these
functions back.  There's something about "seek" and "clusters" but I'm
already in over my head :-(

Can anyone help figure out any more or different commands I need to use
to not lose the functions when I stream the videos to the TVs like this?

Thanks a lot :-)

Jen