[FFmpeg-user] Trouble with h264 video in mpeg ts container

[Moritz Barsnick]

On Thu, Sep 04, 2014 at 11:35:57 +0200, Xavier Benech wrote:
> frame=    7 fps=0.0 q=-1.0 Lsize=     558kB time=00:01:10.10 bitrate=65.2kbits/s
> video:68kB audio:411kB subtitle:0kB other streams:0kB global headers:0kB muxing overhead: 16.576685%

I get the same but a different muxing overhead.

> > ffmpeg/bin/ffprobe tests/converted/passthrough.ts
[...]
> Input #0, mpegts, from 'tests/converted/passthrough.ts':
>    Duration: 00:00:09.84, start: 38279.388856, bitrate: 87 kb/s
>    Program 1
>      Stream #0:0[0x44](???): Audio: aac ([15][0][0][0] / 0x000F), 48000 Hz, stereo, fltp, 55 kb/s

Mine appears "mostly correct", at least not totally corrupted:

Input #0, mpegts, from '6lVe4aXsFEQEL3BbX66FgdmzLf681KR8dF4gviRV94X5jB1HutXX9ZuOGDQI70K8.ts':
  Duration: 00:00:59.90, start: 1.400000, bitrate: 74 kb/s
  Program 1
    Metadata:
      service_name    : Service01
      service_provider: FFmpeg
    Stream #0:0[0x100]: Video: h264 ([27][0][0][0] / 0x001B), 90k tbr, 90k tbn, 180k tbc
    Stream #0:1[0x101](fra): Audio: aac ([15][0][0][0] / 0x000F), 48000 Hz, stereo, fltp, 60 kb/s

But the result plays absolutely horribly in mplayer. Albeit an older
mplayer, which may suffer from an ffmeg demuxing issue, perhaps a
similar issue to the one your ffprobe is seeing. (mplayer uses
libavformat's mpeg-ts demuxer by default, I believe.)

And this may be one of the very reasons you are asked to test with
latest git head. My output above is from a very recent snapshot, you
ffmpeg seems to be from the "release" branch:

> ffprobe version 2.3.2 Copyright (c) 2007-2014 the FFmpeg developers
>    built on Sep  1 2014 15:21:02 with llvm-gcc 4.2.1 (LLVM build 2336.11.00)

That said, my snapshot still isn't doing it correctly either, but
differently.

BTW, on the resulting TS file, mplayer shows block artifacts and other
horrible stuff. vlc shows a black screen, but waits until the second
frame to even pop it up. (vlc furthermore also plays the input file in
black!) Windows Media Player 12 shows a black screen, and then some
blocks or artifacts after a few seconds, and then stops before the
video has ended.

Furthermore, mplayer and vlc seem to calculate their progress bars from
the video's timestamps, not the audio's, and therefore only progress in
steps of 10 seconds. WMP's bar goes smoothly.

Transcoding the video leads to even more peculiar results. I think
you're really lost, at least until you can prove that players can
handle 0.1 fps MPEG-TS well. ;-)

Moritz