Sony Bravia and HD videos (via DLNA)

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).

3 thoughts on “Sony Bravia and HD videos (via DLNA)”

  1. Міша says:

    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!

    1. netchild says:

      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.

  2. Міша says:

    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!

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