[MPlayer-users] Re: H264 HDTV streams can't be watched

[Jeff Clagg]

On Fri, Apr 28, 2006 at 09:30:31PM +0000, Carl Eugen Hoyos wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> (answering my own question)
> 
> > Nico Sabbi <nicola_sabbi <at> fastwebnet.it> writes:
> > > Carl Eugen Hoyos wrote:
> > > >
> > > >Can you reproduce the problem with the sample I provided on
> > > >incoming/GrayH264.ts?
> > > yes, but unfortunately I don't know how to fix it
> > 
> > Can anybody confirm that libavcodec is not yet able to decode it and that
> > the same problem arises when viewing Pro7HD via satellite, or did I simply
> > record garbage because of my hardware/software/provider/whatever?
> 
> Using elecard AVC Plugin I found out that the sample can be played and is
> not just garbage. I think content is interlaced and cannot be decoded using
> libavcodec.
> 
> On the codec status page, FFmpeg H.264 is listed as working. Perhaps it
> should be mentioned in "comments" that it doesn't support interlaced content.
> 
> Is it correct that any DVB stream using AVC contains interlaced frames and
> therefore can't be watched with mplayer?

Interlaced H.264 decoding has been mostly or entirely broken for around
a year now. The gray blocks you see are due to ffmpeg's error
concealment: it doesn't know how to decode these blocks, so it falls
back on its error concealment techniques.