Unable to resume film or start from a specific chapter

[SamES 1057]

If you can share that file somewhere, I'm happy to download and test it if you PM a link.  I know it's big but I'm fine with that if you're happy to upload that size.

[crusher11 1101]

Bump.

[Luke 42078]

If the LG video player is having trouble with the file, there's nothing we can do to fix that as it's not our video player. The best thing we could do is transcode it, in which case the conversion process on the server will have a good chance of cleaning up whatever the problem is.

 

The challenge that makes this difficult is that looking at the media info, it's hard to determine that we should transcode it compared to another similar file that might not be having any problem.

[crusher11 1101]

@@SamES

[SamES 1057]

@@SamES

Sorry, been tied up for a few days. I’ll have time tonight to see what’s going on

[SamES 1057]

OK, here's what I think is happening (good game btw!)

 

There is something not right about the mkv container layout.  What I can see is that the mkv seek head entries are at the end of the file, not the start.  Due to the way the file is read by the TV in DirectPlay mode this results in the seek info being unavailable until the end of the file is reached.  This is probably what is causing your seek/resume issue. 

 

Fortunately this is an easy fix.  Since you're using MKVToolNix anyway, load the file into the Multiplexer tab, set a destination file output and start multiplexing.  This will just rewrite the streams to a new mkv container (without any transcoding or modification of the streams) and the seek head will now be at the start of the file.  This should be all that's required to fix this.

 

However, I did notice that this file does not DirectPlay on my Samsung TV either.  In this case it throws a 'PLAYER_ERROR_NOT_SUPPORTED_FORMAT' error and falls back to transcoding.  I suspect that the encoding of the video stream is not quite correct as it is reporting 16 Reference Frames.  For a High@L4 @ 720x576 file, according to the following reference, I believe that the maximum reference frames should be 9 (4.3 Levels). I have seen too many reference frames cause problems with playback in the past.

 

So, in summary:

1. The mkv container layout does not seem to be correct, but rewriting it to a new file resolves your seeking problems.  
2. The reference frame count in the video stream does not seem to conform to the recommended maximum of 9 for this format.  Fortunately this does not impact the LG player, but is a problem in the case of Samsung and possibly others.

Therefore, I would question how this file has been generated as it does appear to have some non-conformances.  While you are fortunate that we can resolve your immediate problem quite easily, you may find that in the future (for example, when you replace your TV) you may face a new problem.  If you are able to re-encode this file from the original and resolve these issues now then you might be better off in the long run.

[crusher11 1101]

So how do I identify these files? I've got quite a few I'm going to have to go through.

[SamES 1057]

Is there something common about the files you have issues with?  Are they all from the same source?  Ideally I would be getting them re-encoded from the original source with the Reference frames set correctly.

 

The easiest way to identify these might be from the invalid Reference Frame count, but that would mean opening them all in mediainfo.