Pal transcoding?

[Alfiegerner]

I've seen around the forum people succesfully transcoding material to their mvp's with an athlon 2800. When I try with my athlon 2800 i'm getting jerky playback and blocky artefacts everywhere.

Is there any chance that this is PAL related?: are there any users in PAL land succefully using the transcoding feature? I just want to know for sure if upgrading my kit will solve the problem.

[rtengvad]

Tell me how to create a divx file and I'll check if my system creates problems

rtengvad

[Henki]

I've experienced the same with an athlon xp2500. But after some testing it looks like the reason is bad frame rate conversion in ffmpeg.

Xvid/divx files in Pal frame rate 25 is playing perfectly, but files in NTSC frame rates 23.9 or 29 are jerky and blocky.

I'll to look more into ffmpeg to see if there is a solution.

[Henki]

It looks like it wasn't bad conversion, but actually no conversion at all. The problem is that PAL MVP doesn't like files with an other frame rate than 25.

Anyway this worked for me:

In sage.properties, find your "media_server/transcode_quality" that you have made for PAL, and put in "-r 25" before "-f DVD")

In my sage.properties it looks like this:
media_server/transcode_quality/DVD2=-r 25 -f dvd -b 4000 -s 720x576 -acodec mp2 -ab 384

[Alfiegerner]

Excellent news! Thanks Henki that's really made my day.

I had a quick chance to try a 25fps .avi file before work this morning and found it played back perfectly. Previously I had been tring ntsc encoded files.

I'' try changing the setting later tonight.

edit: I'm wondering why the MVP should struggle playing back other frame rates than 25fps ? Is this a hardware limitation or an issue with the sage media player?

[Alfiegerner]

Now streaming divx Thanks Henki.

[deanm]

This does not work for me. If I close Sage down and put "-r 25" before "-f dvd" like you said, I still have a jerky and blocky picture. If I then close Sage down again and go back into my sage.properties file the -r 25 has been removed. My system is an Intel P4 2400. Any ideas anyone?

[Alfiegerner]

Yeah I had the same problem. You need to create a new transcode quality.

Create another entry for media_server/transcode_quality except make it DVD2. Add the proper pal settings to that one, i.e. like Henki said:

media_server/transcode_quality/DVD2=-r 25 -f dvd -b 4000 -s 720x576 -acodec mp2 -ab 384

Then in you MVP's MAC.properties in the clients folder change the miniclient/transcode_mode so it points to the new setting, i.e:

miniclient/transcode_mode=DVD2

[deanm]

Fantastic Thanks Alfiegerner and Henki

I can finaly watch Lost seson 2 on my MPVs. All I need now is DVDs to work