vlc crashes when playing x264 mkv

[kharan5876]

I encoded an mkv using x264, with audio, subtitles, and dvd style chapters.
When attempting to play back this mkv with vlc media player it crashes whenever I attempt to goto Chapter 2 with the following error message:
vlc: /var/tmp/portage/libmatroska-0.8.0/work/libmatroska-0.8.0/make/linux/../../matroska/KaxCluster.h:131: uint64 libmatroska::KaxCluster::GlobalTimecodeScale() const: Assertion `bTimecodeScaleIsSet' failed.
Aborted


I encoded from a dvd source using mplayer 2pass encode to x264. Here are the encoding options I used:

mencoder dvd://1 -dvd-device ../../COWBOY_BEBOP -oac copy -ovc x264 -x264encopts frameref=6:bframes=4:b_pyramid:weight_b:4x4mv:qcomp=0.7:nr=100:bitrate=700:turbo=1:pass=1 -vf pullup,softskip,crop=720:464:0:8,harddup -ofps 24000/1001 -o /dev/null

mencoder dvd://1 -dvd-device ../../COWBOY_BEBOP -oac copy -ovc x264 -x264encopts frameref=6:bframes=4:b_pyramid:weight_b:4x4mv:qcomp=0.7:nr=100:bitrate=700:pass=2 -vf pullup,softskip,crop=720:464:0:8,harddup -ofps 24000/1001 -o bebop.avi

avi2raw bebop.avi bebop.264

MP4Box -add bebop.264 -new bebop.mp4 -fps 23.976


This is the general encoding sceme I have been using for all of my videos. I noticed some other ones also crashed vlc when seeking through the video.
My question is, could this just a bug with vlc media player or am I doing something wrong like using unsafe encoding options?

[Kurtnoise]

Did you compile vlc by yourself ? What vlc release did you use ?

[kharan5876]

VLC-0.8.4a

I compiled Vlc myself because I use gentoo linux, a source based linux distro. Anyway I have identified some serious issues with avi2raw. I used it on some other x264 encoded avi's and some of them had been cut off in the middle of the movie and they also caused vlc to crash while seeking. I just tried another movie using

mencoder movie.avi -oac copy -ovc copy -of rawvideo -o movie.264

and then converting to mp4 using MP4Box, and finally to mkv.

I tried seeking all over in that video using vlc and it did not crash. I will continue experimenting with this method. Perhaps avi2raw was the problem, anyway after this I recommend staying away from that program if any of you guys are using it.

[Kurtnoise]

I'd say

1/ try to upgrade your VLC build. Maybe there is an issue during compilation with Matroska lib.
2/ Why not using directly mp4 output in mencoder ?

[DarkZell666]

VLC has been reported to crash on x264+mkv in the past, but they finally got round to fixing the problem IIRC. +1 for trying the latest version (>= 0.8.5 now).