Played Blu-Ray Batman Begins, Devil's Rejects, or Harold & Kumar?

[ggking7]

I can't get mplayer to play Batman Begins, The Devil's Rejects, or Harold & Kumar Go To Guantanamo Bay. In each instance, whether playing from Blu-Ray or the hard disk, console output stops at "libavformat file format detected" and the mplayer window never opens. Has anyone been able to play one of these Blu-Rays?

[ggking7]

Ah! These titles all have multiple video streams and ffmpeg -i gives an error about one or more of the streams having a different frame rate than the container. I can play the videos just fine if I remux with a single video stream.

[kkloster21]

i am able to play batman begins fine if i don't use the lavf demuxer (i just don't specify any demuxer). I'm not sure what you mean by remuxing with a single video stream but i have seen the "libavformat file format detected." message before when trying to use the lavf demuxer. is there another way to get around this?

also, are you able to play the TrueHD track on this (or any) disc?

[ggking7]

You're right, I'm able to play Batman Begins if I don't specify a demuxer, although I'm having trouble with the audio. I thought the lavf demuxer was required to play Blu-Ray. Is it only required for certain codecs?

How should I deal with TrueHD?

[kkloster21]

the lavf demuxer is not required to play blu-ray movies. not only that but, on some blu-rays it won't work. sometimes you need to not specify a demuxer or try a different demuxer (such mpegts).

for TrueHD - as far as i know, it is not possible to play TrueHD tracks from blu-ray discs in linux. i think some people have been able to use programs to extract TrueHD tracks from blu-ray rips and mux them together with a video stream but as for playing them from disc - as far as i know - it isn't possible in linux YET. or at least i haven't seen any evidence to the contrary.

i started a thread about it here (although maybe i should try to have it moved to the Linux, Mac OS X & Co. forum... ?):

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=141970

what sucks is that this means that we linux users can't play any blu-rays with only TrueHD (or PCM) tracks. I have been looking for a solution: searching around here, asking plenty of people, posting on ffmpeg and mplayer mailing lists, trying a million different mplayer switch combinations. the really frustrating thing is that i keep reading that mplayer has support for MLP/TrueHD decoding! and i see that it has an mlp decoder, but i can't get it to work! check out the thread above and please post there if you find anything. we are not the only ones who are trying to do this. the more people join the cause, the more likely we are to find a solution :)

[ggking7]

Yeah I'm in the same boat as you. It looks like it should work, mplayer is supposed to have mlp support, but it doesn't. I've just contacted someone who says it works so we'll see how that goes.

I am able to remux such a Blu-Ray disc with tsremux via 'mono *.exe' and the TrueHD converter box checked. It then plays fine, but yeah not from disc.

[Gusar]

The problem is that Blu-ray TrueHD tracks have AC3 packets interleaved in the stream. It's because TrueHD isn't a mandatory codec for Blu-ray players, so the stream is made in a way that non-TrueHD supporting players will play the AC3 stream. FFmpeg and MPlayer are as of yet incapable of dealing with such streams.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.ffmpeg.devel/69513/focus=69613

[kkloster21]

@Gusar:

what about PCM tracks? Do you know if those can be played from a blu-ray disc in mplayer? I haven't been able to get any PCM tracks to play. I know that mplayer has a pcm decoder but, i've never been able to get it to work (trying all kinds of -ac switches like pcm, dvdpcm, lpcm, with and without the lavf demuxer). is there a certain demuxer and/or audio codec that will do it? thanks for your informative reply above.

[Gusar]

kkloster21, if you're up for it, read the entire thread I linked to. The gist of it is, the lavf maintainer does not consider Blu-ray streams as "standard" and because of that, certain Blu-ray streams (which includes PCM) are not supported.

[kkloster21]

@Gusar -

i read through that whole thread. its pretty discouraging... Mans does not seem to be very interested in getting ffmpeg to work for TrueHD or PCM streams (from blu-ray discs). there was definitely a disagreement over what is considered a "standard". what's more, Mans doesn't seem very compassionate - i'm sure he'd send me straight to his "firing squad".

i wonder if there has been any developments since then (i noticed that all happened from about the 9th to the 11th of June this year.) ?

I actually subscribed to the libav-users and the ffmpeg-users mailing lists a couple of weeks ago and asked these questions. i didn't get any responses really. :\

[ggking7]

I may have some new info here. A guy on the Gentoo forums insists mlp/truehd works with an ffmpeg patch, although I'm not sure he's actually decoded. Here's a link to the post:

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?p=5291325#5291325

[nm]

That patch and SOC task were about encoding since FFmpeg already has a working MLP/TrueHD decoder. The reason why it doesn't like Blu-ray streams (haven't tried myself though) seems to be related to demuxing.

[kkloster21]

the thread that Gusar posted above (which is a thread from the ffmpeg-devel mailing list) shows a conversation between madshi, a software developer/regular of this forum, and Mans Rullgard, the maintainer of mpeg-ps/ts for ffmpeg, (and other people also, but the debate is between these two). basically, TrueHD tracks on blu-ray are interwoven with AC3 streams also - this interwoven track cannot be decoded by ffmpeg. Mans refuses to add the capability to parse/split these two streams because the blu-ray TrueHD spec is not a "standard" specification. The disagreement between madshi and Mans is basically: developing the most robust software possible that can handle anything that the users throw at it (madshi's philosophy) vs not developing software for specifications that are not standardized (Mans' philosophy).

of course if/when madshi sees my post here, he will correct the mistakes in my sweeping, generalized explanation but, i think this is basically what is going on here.

[ggking7]

I'm being told that specifying the audio codec as ffmlp works for another guy as far as playing back TrueHD audio streams. It doesn't work for me, but have you tried that?

[kkloster21]

i have tried it and it does not work for me. can you get some more details from this person on their exact input at the command line and maybe what disc they had success with? i've read that as of now, ffmpeg (and therefore mplayer) are NOT capable of playing back TrueHD tracks from blu-ray discs because of the embedded AC3 streams inside all blu-ray TrueHD tracks. is it very recently that this person has been able to get it working? maybe there has been a recent update to ffmpeg. also, are you sure that this guy is playing the movie from the disc? or has he ripped it and processed it with a demuxer/remuxer or something?

interested to hear more from you. thanks for the update.

[ggking7]

He claims to be actually playing the TrueHD streams this way. Here's what he said:

"I also finally found time to test a truHDaudio-encoded disk and it worked for me. The audiocodec to use is ffmlp..."

Here's the discussion:

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-691564-start-100.html

His comment is on page 5. I've asked him for more information.

[ggking7]

Turns out he was using an HD-DVD when he got TrueHD to work.

[kkloster21]

ah, there it is.

[JohnAStebbins]

FYI, the next development snapshot release of HandBrake can transcode Batman Begins (assuming the encryption has already been removed). Should be coming out this weekend. Watch the handbrake forums for the announcement.