LAV Filters - DirectShow Media Splitter and Decoders

[roytam1]

@nev:
missing revision again ;-)
fatal: reference is not a tree: f43d0060ca04ecbed8cd5a87b9feb33220192064
Unable to checkout 'f43d0060ca04ecbed8cd5a87b9feb33220192064' in submodule path 'libbluray'

[Keiyakusha]

I have problems with 0.52 stable. I even reinstalled windows before I figured out what is the problem...
So after installing LAV 0.52 both x86 and x64 on Win7 Sp1 fully updated and registering its splitter for avi extension - some players play .avi fine, but some able to display only 1st frame of the stream.
Player I'm talking about written in mixture or C and С# .NET but I can't share it.
Then by unchecking avi in LAV splitter I'm losing ability to play avi files at all! If only player doesn't have something to fallback internally to... graphstudio for example returns "can't render file", mentioned above player crashes with exception CLR20r3
Only complete LAV uninstall returns ability to play avi... Is that intended behavior? As I already said, windows is new, nothing media-related but LAV and madvr was ever installed.

Edit: actually 0.51.3 is no different. Maybe this is problem with installer, just tried manually registering filters (as I always did before, only x86 version) and unchecking avi in splitter settings works correctly. I'm still unable to go beyond 1st frame with mentioned player though and so far this happens only with LAV as decoder... but probably I should live with that.

[nevcairiel]

If you use the installer, it will setup LAV to be the source filter for avi, and because these settings are in protected areas of the registry, the LAV Splitter properties page cannot change that (can only have on source filter per extension, and if it fails, windows assumes the file just won't work). If you want to remove one format, you need to re-install it and uncheck avi in the installer.
Didn't i add a note about that on the properties page?

Only getting one frame sounds a lot like it fails at a dynamic format change.

[Keiyakusha]

Originally Posted by nevcairiel

If you want to remove one format, you need to re-install it and uncheck avi in the installer. Didn't i add a note about that on the properties page?

Nope :P I see note that primary formats should be configured through installer. To me it means "hey, you know that there is an installer, right? it is easier to do some stuff there, that's what usually installers are for" and my 1st thought is "meh, why would i need that?"
Maybe this is partially because I don't know what is primary formats... for years my primary formats are .mkv and .mov ^__^
Also this is not really intuitive to have checkboxes that in some cases can only break stuff if unchecked. If there can be only one source filter, and changes can't be rolled back by property page, maybe it is better do not allow to change them at all if installer used?

Originally Posted by nevcairiel

Only getting one frame sounds a lot like it fails at a dynamic format change.

This is probably the case. Not that I can accept format changes as decoded frames go directly into real 3d environment that won't be happy about that. I remember you was explaining something about this behavior, so not a problem then, I'll try to use something like ffms2/vapoursynth input anyway.

[Joniii]

This BD doesn't work with LAV filters. It plays fine with LAV on MPC-HC but fails to play on WMP or WMC, it also reports playtime as 1200 minutes or so. It works fine with ffdshow and WMP/WMC. Dunno if it's a LAV problem or LAV+VSfilter, it has PGS subtitles. Out of my 100+ remuxes i've ripped to my HTPC, this is the only one that doesn't work on LAV.

Dark Shadows sample (50Mb)

[nevcairiel]

Originally Posted by Joniii

This BD doesn't work with LAV filters. It plays fine with LAV on MPC-HC but fails to play on WMP or WMC, it also reports playtime as 1200 minutes or so. It works fine with ffdshow and WMP/WMC. Dunno if it's a LAV problem or LAV+VSfilter, it has PGS subtitles. Out of my 100+ remuxes i've ripped to my HTPC, this is the only one that doesn't work on LAV.

Dark Shadows sample (50Mb)

Your sample plays just fine in WMP for me. Says 19 seconds runtime, and plays perfectly, but i don't have VSFilter setup.
I'm not even sure how to setup VSFilter to get loaded in WMP, i don't really care for that player at all =p

Overall, i usually tell people that with WMP they are on their own. One would think that Microsoft would implement their own DirectShow properly, but they don't.

Edit:
Managed to make it load VSFilter, and it still plays just fine.

[clsid]

Any tips on how I can checkout a specific old revision of the FFmpeg submodule? For example:
http://code.google.com/p/lavfilters/source/detail?r=32584bb0aa0eb89bea9cdd13bc3cc224a3df2c18
This did not work:
git checkout 6f1788a98096036ed7b458489393f7fb33320a2c
I can of course select a specific commit in the log, but that doesn't give me the desired combo of upstream FFmpeg + your custom patches.

[nevcairiel]

You can only checkout old ffmpeg versions which are tagged, so for this case it means you can only get the ffmpeg versions present in the release versions of LAV, because thats when i tagged ffmpeg as well. All other revisions get removed from the repository when i move to the next.

[cyberbeing]

LAV Video appears to be using "MPEG-1 centered chroma placement" instead of "MPEG-2 left chroma placement" for DVD subtitles.

[nevcairiel]

Originally Posted by cyberbeing

LAV Video appears to be using "MPEG-1 centered chroma placement" instead of "MPEG-2 left chroma placement" for DVD subtitles.

If it does, then thats a bug in swscale, and nothing i care about. Blending subtitles in YUV 4:2:0 will always have a high chance of color bleeding.

[cyberbeing]

Use of centered chroma placement is a swscale issue when performing RGB->YCbCr conversion.

Left chroma placement does eliminate at least 90% of 4:2:0 color bleeding, when used with madVR. We saw a rather significant improvement when we fixed the chroma placement code in xy-VSFilter.

[nevcairiel]

I sure don't feel like fixing swscale, the code is so terribly messy. I wonder if swscale does the right thing when i convert it to yuv444 first and then downscale chroma to 420, but probably not..

[SamuriHL]

Hey Nev...is this me?

6>c:\dev\projects\lavfilters\ffmpeg\libavutil\x86/timer.h(33): error C2065: '__a
sm__' : undeclared identifier
6>c:\dev\projects\lavfilters\ffmpeg\libavutil\x86/timer.h(33): error C2143: synt
ax error : missing ';' before 'volatile'
6>c:\dev\projects\lavfilters\ffmpeg\libavutil\x86/timer.h(33): error C2143: synt
ax error : missing ';' before 'volatile'
6>c:\dev\projects\lavfilters\ffmpeg\libavutil/internal.h(174): error C2065: '__a
sm__' : undeclared identifier
6>c:\dev\projects\lavfilters\ffmpeg\libavutil/internal.h(174): error C2143: synt
ax error : missing ';' before 'volatile'
6>c:\dev\projects\lavfilters\ffmpeg\libavutil/internal.h(174): error C2143: synt
ax error : missing ';' before 'volatile'
6>c:\dev\projects\lavfilters\ffmpeg\libavutil/internal.h(174): error C2589: ':'
: illegal token on right side of '::'

[Xaurus]

nev,

I am having some issues sorting out the subtitle selection syntax. Right now I am using your example from the readme file.
I am currently trying to load english subtitles from a german bluray. When I check the m2ts with Mediainfo, there is no mentioning of language for audio (nor for the subs). Where can I see what language they are in?
I checked a few american blurays and it's the same thing there, really.

[nevcairiel]

The m2ts on a Blu-ray don't contain language information, its all contained in the metadata files on the Blu-rays. If you play the discs and look at the stream selector in MPC-HC, it will show the languages if it can figure them out, or well, not if it can't.

[Xaurus]

Originally Posted by nevcairiel

The m2ts on a Blu-ray don't contain language information, its all contained in the metadata files on the Blu-rays. If you play the discs and look at the stream selector in MPC-HC, it will show the languages if it can figure them out, or well, not if it can't.

Alright, that explains a lot. Do you know if any program can add a language tag to such a file, or is it simply not possible for that container format?

I thought about storing some blurays "untouched" by just copying the m2ts files to a hdd. But I see that this can cause some language trouble.

[cyberbeing]

Originally Posted by nevcairiel

I sure don't feel like fixing swscale, the code is so terribly messy. I wonder if swscale does the right thing when i convert it to yuv444 first and then downscale chroma to 420, but probably not..

If swscale yuv444->yuv420 doesn't work, would it possible to use swscale conversion to yuv444 and then make use xy-VSFilter's optimized hleft_vmid 4:2:0 chroma sub-sampling functions?

[nevcairiel]

The optimized versions can most likely not be used because subtitles rarely are mod16, they have all sorts of odd sizes, and for these small bitmaps trying to pad them to the proper size will most likely be more effort then its worth in the end.
I can probably take the subsampling algorithm and use it, if all else fails.

[Joniii]

Originally Posted by nevcairiel

Your sample plays just fine in WMP for me. Says 19 seconds runtime, and plays perfectly, but i don't have VSFilter setup.
I'm not even sure how to setup VSFilter to get loaded in WMP, i don't really care for that player at all =p

Overall, i usually tell people that with WMP they are on their own. One would think that Microsoft would implement their own DirectShow properly, but they don't.

Edit:
Managed to make it load VSFilter, and it still plays just fine.

Weird. I have clean install of W8, just LAV filters and VSfilter, no codec packs or anything. I checked the grapgedit and all looks good.

I found out that the files I splitted only the first one doesn't play, part 2 and others work fine, dunno if there is some header problem. Also if I remux that sample with mkvtoolnix without the DTS Master Audio track, it plays fine.

I've set LAV audio to only bitsream AC3 and DTS as my receiver doesn't support DTS-HD. For some reason in Windows 8 WMP/WMC, LAV audio can't decode DTS core from that mkv. Most of my remuxes have DTS-MA and core from those work fine on LAV Audio. Dunno if there is something unusual on this audio track, i've also tried to rip the BD again with eac3to but with the same results.

edit:
I tried to extract the core with eac3to and adding that into the mkv instead of DTS-MA and it worked. Dunno why DTS-MA doesn't.

Could it be that LAV audio can't get the core from that DTS-MA track?

[nevcairiel]

I tried bitstreaming the core only and it works just fine, both in WMC and MPC-HC. But i only use Win7, no idea whats different in Windows 8, you're on your own there.

I suggest to use decoding anyway, especially if your receiver cannot do HD formats.