I made some more tests which video resolutions my TV accepts via DLNA. While I was looking before a SD resolutions, this time I took care about some HD resolutions.
As the Sintel video in the 1024×436 resolution did not play, I tried to reencode it to 1024×720 (for the enabled x264 options see below). This did not work either. After that I went to the official resolution of 1280×720, and this works. Initially this video was encoded as High@L3.1, but with this the TV produced some artifacts on playback. After changing this to High@L4.0 (simply by remuxing instead of reencoding), the playback was fine (warning: increasing the H.264 level is OK, decreasing it if the video does not comply to the lowered level, may cause problems). I miss a setting in avidemux for the level, it would be nice if there would be the possibility to set it.
I also tested if the 1280×544 version of the Sintel video plays fine on the TV or not. It does not play fine, so there is probably a hard requirement on the complete resolution for HD video.
While doing this I noticed that tsMuxeR is truncating the audio, instead of the 6 channel audio it was before, the remuxed file has only two channels.
As I did not want to always go through all the settings to enter what I want, I made a little avidemux-script to setup (ECMA script + xml) everything for me. This was easy, I just took an existing one (the Sony PSP one) as a base and changed the encoding options and the target container (unluckily avidemux 2.5.4 does not support H.264 in MPEG-TS yet, so I have to use a MP4 container and remux it into the MPEG-TS stream afterwards).
The options I used for the x264-reencoding are –8x8dct –analyse all –mixed-refs –bime –weightb –subme 9 –b‑rdo –ref 4 –b‑adapt 2 –bframes 4 –direct auto –me umh (this includes b‑pyramid, for which there are reports that it does not work).
Having finally added net/minidlna to our ports collection, I’m trying to figure out my own Sony TV, and – based on your experience – tried converting a few of my videos into .mpg format (mpegts) using a Makefile like this:
.SUFFIXES: .mpg .mkv .avi .flv .wmv .mp4
VPATH= /green/movies
FFMPEG_ARGS= ‑f mpegts ‑sameq ‑vb 4096k \
‑r 25 ‑ac 2 ‑ar 48000 ‑ab 192k \
‑async 2 ‑threads 2
.mkv.mpg:
ffmpeg ‑i “$Video->DLNA server->All videos).
I’m now trying to redo them with an explicit flag ‑s hd1080 (size 1920×1080) to see, what happens…
Meanwhile, I wonder, what does YOUR TV “say”, when it does not like a video-file. Does the file even appear on the list – to be rejected as “invalid” later?
Thanks!
When it does not like the container, it does not have an entry for it. If it does not like the video in the container, it displays a black screen (or some big colored pixels… depending on the degree of disagreement with the video) but plays the audio. I always had the audio working if the container was OK, but I assume it will just play the video without audio if the audio is not OK.
I’m about to commit another DLNA port:
http://aldan.algebra.com/~mi/port-stuff/serviio.shar
Unlike minidlna at the moment, Serviio can do transcoding and, indeed, a good portion of my video collection is now available for viewing on my Sony.
If you can give it a whirl and report back any problems (or absence thereof), it would be great… Thanks!