xine and matroska

[Joe Fenton]

I'm running Fedora Core 3 AMD64. In xine (latest release from Feb), matroska files don't have audio. I haven't been able to find anything about this so I thought I'd ask about it here. Mplayer finds the audio, but plays it at the wrong rate.

[six6]

If mplayer is choking, maybe it's a problem with the file.

It'd be good to get the relevant portion of 'mplayer -v file.mkv'. Also, load the file in mmg from here (http://www.bunkus.org/videotools/mkvtoolnix/index.html). What does it say about the audio/video?

Where is the file from? Did you create it?

[Joe Fenton]

It's a rip of a DVD I made in Windows. Windows plays it fine. It's just XVID and AAC in a Matroska container. I'll probably never rip in that format again given the trouble in linux (I've been using OGM), but I'd like to resolve the problem anyhow.

I figure the problem with mplayer playing it at the wrong speed is due to the fact that it's sampled at 22050Hz, but the playback rate is 44100Hz. I normally use vorbis and I'll go back to it again. I don't see any advantage to AAC over vorbis, but that's not the issue here. :D

I don't know what the deal with xine is other than maybe they haven't compiled with a current version of libmatroska. I checked it with mkvtoolnix when it didn't work in linux. Everything seems fine there, but xine says there's no audio stream at all. Funny thing is it sees the subtitles and displays them just fine. So video and subtitles, but no audio. :confused:

[stephanV]

you might wanna try VLC too

[Joe Fenton]

VLC is brand new, so I thought it might do the trick. Unfortunately, vlc gives me this:

VLC media player 0.8.1 Janus
[00000001] main vlc error: no memcpy module matched "any"
[00000016] main interface error: no interface module matched "hotkeys,none"
[00000016] main interface error: no suitable intf module
[00000001] main vlc error: interface "hotkeys,none" initialization failed
[00000017] main interface error: no interface module matched "any"
[00000017] main interface error: no suitable intf module
[00000001] main vlc error: interface "(null)" initialization failed

vlc -l gives:
[module] [description]
main main program
help Help options
mkv Matroska stream demuxer
ffmpeg ffmpeg audio/video decoder ((MS)MPEG4,SVQ1,H263,WMV,WMA) ffmpeg ffmpeg chroma conversion
ffmpeg ffmpeg audio/video encoder
ffmpeg ffmpeg demuxer
ffmpeg ffmpeg video filter
ffmpeg ffmpeg deinterlace video filter
theora Theora video decoder
theora Theora video packetizer
theora Theora video encoder

EDIT: I just tried vorbis instead of AAC in the matroska file and it seems to work fine with xine. Apparently, the problem is AAC, not the container. Thing is, I have faac and faad libs installed.

[RedDwarf69]

If the problem is this "sampled at 22050Hz, but the playback rate is 44100Hz" then use LC AAC. I'm pretty sure that this 22050 is because SBR.

But I can say that both xine 1.0 and mplayer 1.0pre6 can play matroska with (5.1)(HE)AAC (from Nero/Windows). mplayer seems to have some problem with audio channel mapping when using 5.1 AAC, but that's all.

[Joe Fenton]

Yeah, it was HE-AAC. I guess linux players aren't up to playing it yet unless you're building them from the cvs. HE-AAC is really popular on PC and Mac, but linux isn't quite into it yet.

[KpeX]

Well the support for HE-AAC has been in most player's code for some time..... problem is, the popular linux players take a very long time to produce releases, and it takes even longer for releases to make it into stable distributions. I always use mplayer from CVS, the development it too fast IMO to use a release version.

[Joe Fenton]

I really should learn how to compile xine from the cvs. It's just so much easier to use yum and the repositories. :D

The big problem is that mplayer and xine both require a lot of other libs to build. It would be nice to have all the source for EVERYTHING needed to build xine in one package.