[MPlayer-users] Problem HD h264 mpeg-ts detection

[Reimar Döffinger]

On 8 Jan 2011, at 23:09, Markus Rechberger <mrechberger at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 8, 2011 at 10:45 PM, Reimar Döffinger
> <Reimar.Doeffinger at gmx.de> wrote:
>> On 8 Jan 2011, at 22:34, Markus Rechberger <mrechberger at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> we just tested some H264 transponders from our cable network and it
>>> seems like there's some wrong detection in mplayer.
>>> Usually it seems to detect MPEG2 video and doesn't play anything.
>>> 
>>> --- wrong output ---
>>> cat  /dev/dvb/adapter0/dvr0 | mplayer -cache 10240 -
>>> MPlayer 1.0rc4-4.4.5 (C) 2000-2010 MPlayer Team
>>> mplayer: could not connect to socket
>>> mplayer: No such file or directory
>>> Failed to open LIRC support. You will not be able to use your remote control.
>>> 
>>> Playing -.
>>> Reading from stdin...
>>> Cache fill: 19.06% (1998848 bytes)
>>> TS file format detected.
>>> VIDEO MPEG2(pid=6210) AUDIO A52(pid=6220) NO SUBS (yet)!  PROGRAM N. 0
>>> 
>>> sometimes when it detects h264 the video seems to work:
>>> --------
>>> cat  /dev/dvb/adapter0/dvr0 | mplayer -cache 10240 -
>>> MPlayer 1.0rc4-4.4.5 (C) 2000-2010 MPlayer Team
>>> mplayer: could not connect to socket
>>> mplayer: No such file or directory
>>> Failed to open LIRC support. You will not be able to use your remote control.
>>> 
>>> Playing -.
>>> Reading from stdin...
>>> Cache fill: 19.06% (1998848 bytes)
>>> TS file format detected.
>>> VIDEO H264(pid=6210) AUDIO A52(pid=6220) SUB Teletext(pid=6230)
>>> PROGRAM N. 11120
>>> FPS seems to be: 50.000000
>>> Cache not responding!
>>> 
>>> there's a sample video online (which is detected as MPEG2 -- but it's h264):
>>> http://www.sundtek.de/support/HD_test.ts
>> 
>> While we should of course fix this, if you know the format you really should just specify it, this also avoid some other issues particularly when seeking back is not possible (mostly losing some data), should be something like -demuxer h264es
> 
> thanks for this hint.
> 
> http://support.sundtek.com/index.php/topic,413.0.html it got triggered
> by a customer actually, some projects seem to be based on mplayer
> so it will be difficult to override the channel with -demuxer h264es.

I missed that the format is TS, not raw ES.
I suspect that a PMT is not found in time and thus MPlayer just assumes it is a MPEG-2 stream. It might be time to change that default, but that's not a good solution.
I wonder what kind of solution you would like (if you had a free wish here)?
I mean for existing setups for example making the driver ensure a PMT is around close to the start would help.
Any other solution would mean having to update MPlayer. Among those solution higher default tsprobe might help, however it might increase channel switching times.
Defaulting to H.264 instead of MPEG-2 would probably cause issues with MPEG-2 files.
Detecting the codec from the data contained like lavf does might be some effort and take time.
Using lavf as default would break language association for audio and sub tracks with Blu-ray.

> In case you are interested in free sample hardware (DVB-C/T, DVB-S/S2
> USB) we can also provide this.

Would be interesting (I think DVB code is still quite bad), however I have yet to figure out if there is actually any signal on the satellite connector in my flat...