feature length wont play in QT, but short clip does... wtf?

[Mug Funky]

so i have to make a compact movie for a client to ftp. i decided on QT7 compatible mp4. after spending quite a bit of time getting my CLI to work, and testing the result in quicktime just to make sure, i did my encode.

now i discover to my horror that QT just plays sound and a white screen. i don't get it - i made my test clips in exactly the same way with the same source and the same settings for both x264, faac and mp4box. test clips varied from 1000 frames to 5000 frames, cut from random points in my source.

is there any reason quicktime 7 pro doesn't want to play something a little longer? i'm at my wits end on this one - i don't want to re-encode but will probably have to, and since this has happened i can't even be sure if the *$^(#* will work once encoded, no matter how much testing i do.

i'm off to play this in a mac to see if it's just my version...

[edit]

crapple doesn't play it either. movie is 115.5 minutes, btw.

[edit 2]

here's my batch (bitrate is 476):
SET /P rate= enter average bitrate:
"C:\Program Files\AviSynth 2.5\plugins\avs2wav.exe" "%~1" - |"C:\Program Files\x264\faac.exe" -q 100 - -o "%~dpn1_audio.m4a"
"C:\Program Files\x264\x264.exe" --bitrate %rate% --bframes 2 --analyse p8x8,b8x8,i4x4,p4x4 --thread-input --progress --no-psnr --output "%~dpn1_x264.264" "%~1"

MP4Box.exe -fps 23.976 -add "%~dpn1_x264.264" -add "%~dpn1_audio.m4a" "%~dpn1.reenc.mp4"

[ChronoCross]

I thought QT could only handle 1 bframe? or was it no bframes? I can't remember.

[Mug Funky]

dunno. i think it's max 2... i lifted that CLI from this forum :) either way the above settings worked for my test clips. just not the full length one...

[Mug Funky]

well anyhoo, i'm going to play with this over the weekend and see if i can make it work. thing is i don't want to make the client have to download extra crap just so they can play the file... even if i'm respecting standards it wont seem that way if "the standard" crapbucket quicktime can't play a perfectly good file.

i just tried an older version of mp4box (it said "Adjusting AVC sizelength to 24 bits" a couple of times, but otherwise output was the same) and that didn't help at all.

does QT need a hint track or anything? or is it just stupid?

[setarip_old]

When you load the full length version into QT, if you click on the "Windows" dropdown menu and select "Show Movie Properties" (NOT "Show Movie Information") does it indicate both a video format and a video length?

[Mug Funky]

i get something similar to this:


Name | Duration | Data Size |Sample Count |Format
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
shadowless sword - feature | 01:55:41 |-NA- |491845 |-NA-
[x] Video Track | 01:55:41 |-NA- |166440 |H.264
[x] Sound Track | 01:55:41 |103.21 MB |325405 |AAC

hope that helps...

[edit]

when i hit play, the audio goes and the seekbar is seekable (and advances at about the right speed when playing).

[Mug Funky]

i tried putting a "trim(0,last.framecount-1)" on the end of a severely decimated (.5 fps) version and it worked. weeeeiiiirrrd. the decimated version without the trim didn't work.

is this an avisynth thing? at work i'm using the diagnostic build (float audio is awesome btw - soft encode will take it and avs2wav will output it so i'm sitting pretty with that), and at home i've got the latest one before that.

[edit]

oops, spoke too soon - did an overnight encode using the same idea and it still didn't work. this is beginning to annoy. is anyone else having this problem?

[bond]

any error messages from quicktime?

try setting -fps 25 and check if it works
try mp4creator for creating the mp4 (why didnt you encode to .mp4 right away?)

either way, quicktime sucks...

[Mug Funky]

try setting -fps 25 and check if it works
that's a pretty good idea. will try it and edit this post.

(why didnt you encode to .mp4 right away?)
wanted to be able to view the stream while it was encoding... mplayer will play a 264 file but it wont play an incomplete mp4 file. though that's a stupid reason to go that path... either way, i did try making mp4 to begin with and it failed at 23.976fps.

quicktime gives no error message at all. not even the (ever so helpful) numbered error messages. it just showed a white screen as if it was the most normal thing in the world, and played the audio. it didn't appear to try to seek the video either - seek times were very fast, so i can't imagine it's decoding anything but audio.

[SeeMoreDigital]

This is rather odd...

All of the encodes I create for my clients are generated using x264 (admittedly without b-frames but) with 2Ch AAC audio and muxed with YAMB.

As my encodes are clips of TV commercials the longest one will be around 90 seconds (2250 frames). Even so they all appear to play okay in QT7 player when muxed to either MP4 or MOV.


Cheers

[Sharktooth]

I thought QT could only handle 1 bframe? or was it no bframes? I can't remember.
someone says 2... but it can effectively handle only 1.

[Mug Funky]

that's strange... it does appear to handle 2 b-frames, at least for the clips i've done that have worked.

i'll try an encode with 1 b-frame and see if i have any more luck with it.

either way, quicktime sucks...
tell me about it. if it wasn't for the fact that i need to provide a file that's small enough to comfortably FTP, and also playable right out of the box (i wouldn't want to spend days of back-and-forth emails to the UK saying "download ffdshow... no not that build... okay, now get the haali splitter and use MPC to play the file.... oh that didn't work, maybe try VLC player". that kind of thing just wastes everybody's time, and the file isn't going to the techies).

i just wish standards were respected, rather than just paid lipservice to with incomplete and crappy implementations (in both the windows and mac world). if OS's came with mp4 AVC support out of the box it'd be a great thing. or if WMP used auto codec download to allow mp4 support, it'd be even better.

[edit]

just tried a re-encode with 1 b-frame and also tried muxing it at 25fps.

my conclusion: quicktime is balls. i think it might be a deliberate thing... maybe to prevent DVD ripping? good on them, stupid bastards. they've just made my job a lot harder and worse quality. perhaps i should send apple something in return? like something dead?