AV1 Playback on macOS app

[sweetmslily 2]

Hi folks. Ran into a bit of a snag here. For storage as well as efficiency reasons I'm switching to doing most of our archiving in AV1 instead of HEVCx264. I have transcoding enabled on the server, and it seems to work well. I've tested on AppleTV, LG webOS, iOS, Xbox One, all the apps seem to work well, with one exception being the macOS emby app. Now I usually use emby in a browser and that doesn't pose a problem, works perfectly, but the macOS app shows a black screen with audio when playing an AV1 file. I assume I don't have something set up correctly as it's working fine in so many other places. Would anyone be able to look into this for me or walk me through how to correct it? Thanks. 

[Luke 37066]

 

Hi there, let's look at an example. Please attach the information requested in how to report a media playback issue. Thanks!

 

[blgentry 49]

19 hours ago, sweetmslily said:

For storage as well as efficiency reasons I'm switching to doing most of our archiving in AV1 instead of HEVCx264.

Speaking from my own personal experience:  If you are a collector of movies and you intend to have a long term collection, you don't want to do this.  The only correct thing to do, with all of your media that you actually care about keeping long term, is to keep it in the exact distributed format.  In the video world, there are no lossless conversions.  Only lossy to more lossy.  Disc drives are cheap.  They get cheaper every year.  What is your cost of re-aquiring the original digital media?  In my case it meant re-ripping a lot of optical media. 

 

I'd rather keep the original media, with the original CODECs.  That way I never wonder if I've introduced an artifact, a playback problem,  or a compatibility issue.  Because I have the originals.  I never worry about unusual CODECs because they are the original. 

 

YMMV depending upon your intentions and your tolerance for technical problems.

 

Brian.

[sweetmslily 2]

4 hours ago, blgentry said:

Speaking from my own personal experience:  If you are a collector of movies and you intend to have a long term collection, you don't want to do this.  The only correct thing to do, with all of your media that you actually care about keeping long term, is to keep it in the exact distributed format.  In the video world, there are no lossless conversions.  Only lossy to more lossy.  Disc drives are cheap.  They get cheaper every year.  What is your cost of re-aquiring the original digital media?  In my case it meant re-ripping a lot of optical media. 

 

I'd rather keep the original media, with the original CODECs.  That way I never wonder if I've introduced an artifact, a playback problem,  or a compatibility issue.  Because I have the originals.  I never worry about unusual CODECs because they are the original. 

 

YMMV depending upon your intentions and your tolerance for technical problems.

 

Brian.

Thanks for this! I may not have expressed myself clearly in the original post. I won't be converting my x264 material into AV1. There's no functional point to that, and I don't have a lot of the original optical media anymore so I can't get a fresh master copy with which to make an AV1 file. However, I am switching to AV1 from here on out. My achiving machine runs an AV1 encode about twice as fast as an x264, and I get the same quality and a teeny bit smaller file size (I don't have the compression turned up very high, as fully relaxed, the files are the same size as x264 or smaller).

 

 

21 hours ago, Luke said:

 

Hi there, let's look at an example. Please attach the information requested in how to report a media playback issue. Thanks!

 

Hi Luke! Thanks for this, I'll get the information and report back. I have since noticed that AV1 playback is only not working on my M2 MacBook Air in the emby app. The same app (the one from the app store) is playing AV1 content back fine on my Intel iMac. 

[sweetmslily 2]

@LukeI've attached the server log to this message in a TextEdit format as it's huge and I'm not sure it would even fit in the post as-is. Hope this helps. 

Emby Log.rtf

[blgentry 49]

3 hours ago, sweetmslily said:

I won't be converting my x264 material into AV1. There's no functional point to that, and I don't have a lot of the original optical media anymore so I can't get a fresh master copy with which to make an AV1 file. However, I am switching to AV1 from here on out. My achiving machine runs an AV1 encode about twice as fast as an x264, and I get the same quality and a teeny bit smaller file size (I don't have the compression turned up very high, as fully relaxed, the files are the same size as x264 or smaller).

I use the CODECs that are on the disc:  h.264, VC1, DTS-HD MA, AC3, etc.  Are you ripping and converting to a common video CODEC when you rip discs?  If so, why?  Why not keep the original unaltered?  You can only lose quality during a conversion.

 

Do whatever makes you happy of course.

 

Take care,

Brian.

[sweetmslily 2]

22 hours ago, blgentry said:

I use the CODECs that are on the disc:  h.264, VC1, DTS-HD MA, AC3, etc.  Are you ripping and converting to a common video CODEC when you rip discs?  If so, why?  Why not keep the original unaltered?  You can only lose quality during a conversion.

 

Do whatever makes you happy of course.

 

Take care,

Brian.

Two reasons. Most of the content I'm archiving comes from DVDs, which are MPEG2 encoded. To me it's not worth storing multi-gigabyte files encoded in a 25 year old technology for a perceived quality benefit. I run the AV1 encoder wide open in terms of compression, so as to lose as little as possible, I also encode in 10 bit to prevent banding and apply a medium unsharp filter using ultrafine granularity. If anything, the finished files look better than the original source. And they're a fraction of the size. Which is the other reason, storage. I can fit 4-8 films in the same space as one MPEG2 lossless DVD rip. If I can't see the difference between the two on a 5K retina display, then I figure this is a good compromise. 

Thanks for the heads up though! If I was archiving 1080P or 4K content off of BluRays, it would be a different story altogether, but when the starting point is DVD, there's only so much I'm going to squeeze out of them. 

[Luke 37066]

On 10/26/2023 at 7:06 PM, sweetmslily said:

@LukeI've attached the server log to this message in a TextEdit format as it's huge and I'm not sure it would even fit in the post as-is. Hope this helps. 

Emby Log.rtf 1.23 MB · 0 downloads

Hi, is it trying to direct play?

[lionn1 1]

Hi there,

I just want to add my 2p here, I can very much guarantee that anyone with mac has this issue especially with AV1. 

With any AV1 file, it will direct play but only with a black video stream and audio working fine.

If you transcode it at 720p 4mbps, then the video will output fine (if you transcode it at 1080p any bitrate, it won't have video at all, as far as I have tested)

This is still happening and it's not ideal to change every av1 stream's quality *down* when AV1's quality is superb and great on filesize (would be nice to utilise it!)

Weirdly enough! On Safari, if you play it, it won't direct play however it will have a working transcode at 1080p 8mbps (the app does not, it prefers 720p 4mbps) 

Let me know if there's anything you need me to provide.