[FFmpeg-user] (no subject)

[satelliteviewer at gmx.ca]

On Tue, 16 Feb 2016 00:59:24 +0100, Moritz Barsnick <barsnick at gmx.net> wrote:
 

>> pipe:///usr/local/bin/ffmpeg -loglevel fatal -i http://127.0.0.1:9981/stream/channelnumber/CHANNEL_NUMBER -c:v copy -c:s copy -c:d copy -c:t copy -filter_complex +[0:1][0:2][0:3]amerge=inputs=3,pan=5.1|FL=c0|FR=c1|FC=c2|LFE=c3|BL=c4|BR=c5 -c:a eac3 -f mpegts pipe:1
> I have an idea what the issue could be though!
> It may be this recent commit:
> http://git.videolan.org/gitweb.cgi/ffmpeg.git/?p=ffmpeg.git;a=commit;h=470749703e3cec3a86bc556648a20f0ec1701954
> It changes the format of the output MPEG-TS w.r.t. E-AC3 audio (which
> you are using). If you add "-mpegts_flags system_b", it should revert
> the behavior.
> Please see if that helps. It's a wild guess.
> (BTW, if that's it, then that's something we probably could *not* have
> seen from the console logs. ;-))
 
That was a VERY good guess, thank you!!!  I reinstalled ffmpeg 3.0 and then changed the last part of that URL to:
 
... -c:a eac3 -mpegts_flags system_b -f mpegts pipe:1
 
And now it works!  Unfortunately the new version of ffmpeg still doesn't present the closed captions when the stream is viewed using Kodi (Isengard).  But now I am thinking that is a Kodi issue rather than a ffmpeg issue, because just on a hunch I tried viewing the stream in VLC rather than Kodi, and although for some reason VLC will not play those streams smoothly on my system, I at least was able to see enough to determine that the subtitles are there when viewed using VLC.  So I don't know why Kodi doesn't pick them up, but that's not a ffmpeg problem.  I think Kodi's ATSC subtitle support is very rudimentary at best (on another channel it has the problem of not displaying them quickly enough, so they stack up and get behind until finally a bunch are lost, so it's not just this channel where it doesn't display them properly).
 
Anyway, thank you again for taking the time to post your guess, it was spot on!  I have sent an email to the maintainer of the page I found those instructions on, so hopefully they can get that information passed on.