Re: [Maemo 5] Video playback problems in PR1.1
 

i thought i mentioned it before but maybe i was mistaken lol. haven't found a way to disable it, even through editing /home/user/.config/tracker/tracker.cfg (thumbnailing = false)

is there another way to insta-kill the process?

Re: [Maemo 5] Video playback problems in PR1.1
 

Please take this poll. I would like to see if the problem is related to OTA vs direct PC flash

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=41087

Mike C

Re: [Maemo 5] Video playback problems in PR1.1
 

hey mike, i've done both the ota and flash from bin, same problem. :(

Re: [Maemo 5] Video playback problems in PR1.1
 

ah ok cheers, I was about to download the firmware and flash from PC to see if it makes a diff.

Re: [Maemo 5] Video playback problems in PR1.1
 

I know it seems like this problem is on track to being fixed/solved but I just wanted to add another file into the mix of problematic movie playback..

I've got a few movies and tv show which I've bought from iTunes, I removed the DRM with Requiem and tried playing them, weirdly I had the same '5 White Dots Of Death', as with my home-made encodes, it's starting to look like h.264 playback is broken in general.

In reading the other threads, I had an idea - is the problem with tags within the file?? either present or missing, is maemo/N900 expecting a definite tag that is missing or corrupt?? I know (well think I know) that tags and meta data is store in the first 300 odd kbs or something similar in a file, could this causing the problem??

I feel helpless in this mini-quest to figure out the exact cause and solution, is there anything I could do to help???

Re: [Maemo 5] Video playback problems in PR1.1
 

Seems like we have at least two distinct problems with video playback with PR1.1

The first is lack of video when playing back xvid files over upnp. This is tracked as https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8000

The second problem that people, including me, have seen is (usually) h.264 files failing with an 'infinite 5 flashing dots' error when played locally and 'infinite buffering' when played over upnp. I did some investigations and the results are surprising.

It appears that this is caused by the presence of chapter marks in the files. My files with chapters don't play and the ones with no chapters do not play. Of course, the media player doesn't support chapters so getting rid of them isn't a loss (but re-muxing files is a crummy work around) but there is clearly a regression here.

Unfortunately, my HandBrake preset that we've all been using has chapters turned on by default. I've updated it (still hosted on my server) so anyone who grabs it now won't get trapped by this.

I've filed https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8172 to track this.

Re: [Maemo 5] Video playback problems in PR1.1
 

so chapter's are the problem.. good find.

Re: [Maemo 5] Video playback problems in PR1.1
 

nice catch philipl! seems to be related to this bug reported by egoshin

https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8165

i guess it dovetails with gst-video-thumbnailerd choking on unsupported formats (of which mp4s with chapters is now one) which i mentioned here

http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p...&postcount=195

i've managed to work around this by shifting ALL my unsupported files into a separate folder, editing tracker.cfg to not index that folder as described here

http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p=431617&postcount=6

and afterwards, everything appears fine until i stick an unsupported mp4 file into \MyDocs\.video (x264 with b-frames, HE-ACC) and then the problems start again. it's reproducible 100% of the time.

try it.

remove all mp4s, avis and mkvs from your phone (except for the 2 stock videos, 9 and the n900 intro video, and any camera video clips). you can download an mp4 from youtube as well to check (these work just fine). mess about with mediaplayer all you like, it will not throw an error.

put an unsupported file on the phone (in the untracked directory). play it with kmplayer (osso). it will refuse to play. open media player and play the 9 trailer, it will play fine.

move the unsupported file into \MyDocs\.video. open mediaplayer, attempt to play the file. it will fail, and now all subsequent files will also fail.

btw, philipl, how did you go about determining that chapters was the cause? i don't use chapters in my encodes so i'd never have tested that ...

Re: [Maemo 5] Video playback problems in PR1.1
 

That'll be because Handbreak has chapter markets on by default, even if there are no chapers it must write some sort of info into the meta data, I suppose the easiest fix would be to have Quicktime reencode the video but have the video and audio codecs set as Pass Though mode, that'll remove all meta data and leave a clean file, but that's a pain in the *** if you ask me, especially if you've got more than 20 movies......

Wonder if there's a tool/program that'll batch remove meta data from movie files, kudos if it can just remove chapter information as I have the artwork set on all of my movies..

Re: [Maemo 5] Video playback problems in PR1.1
 

have just tried avidemux and it works. will save m4v as mp4 and its fast. Batch work will have to be via the command line though.

http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/download.html