No Picture on Sony 370?

[prenz]

Has anyone else problems playing back a captured stream from ITV1 HD on Sony's new BDP-S370? These caps play only audio and have a black picture :( Playback on the older BDP-S360 and on PC is ok.

I use TSPE for editing and tsMuxer/multiAVCHD. I had a look into the .264-files, but to my unexperienced eye, I saw nothing obvious that should interfere. Although ITVs stream doesn't have any IDR-Frames, this shouldn't be a problem - BBC HD also have no IDR-Frames and plays perfectly.

Could anyone please point out, what's wrong with this stream (http://rapidshare.com/files/371798660/avc-nopic.rar.html)? I know that reencoding will solve the problem, but I'd rather go without...

[kaid]

No black picture, but I just tried out both an AVCHD and a BD-RE encoded with x264 and muxed with TSmuxer on the S370, and it showed lots of motion vector artifacts! I'm quite sure it was motion vectors and not reference frames (too many reframes look different, at least on my WDTV!), also because i encoded the 1080p video with 4 reframes only, which is the max. for 1080p according to the spec!...

Same behaviour on a Philips BDP-3000 btw... all other players played it just fine!

[Ghitulescu]

You're not supposed to reencode it :)

During my tests with previous generations of BD players I can tell that if the video stream for whatever reasons is not BD compliant, then the player will disregard it. The strangest case was a Samsung, that played the audio and the subtitles but no video.

I suggest use multiavchd and check the log, it would tell you whether the stream is BD compliant or not.

[kaid]

Can't use Multiavchd, i'm on Linux! ;-)
Damn, why does x264 not simply come with profiles like any other program and offer an AVCHD and Bluray profile? there are presets for film etc! Or at least give compliant example settings for BD/AVCHD in the manpage?
Back then, when Shikari announced that x264 was now fully BD-compliant he STILL didn't tell us HOW to actually *use* it to encode 100% compliant streams! Only the changelog included a compliant example setting, which Shikari himself explicitly told people not to use, because it's very bad quality!

Here's the settings I used (1080p): x264 --crf 16 -r 4 --b-adapt 2 --me umh --direct auto --subme 10 --level 4.1 --b-pyramid strict
All the rest is x264 defaults. it's definately a macroblock problem, from the looks of it probably with the motion vectors. should I reduce the default merange (i think it's 16)?

The AVCHD/BD worked perfectly on all players except for that Sony BDP-S370 and a Philips BDP-3000... Pioneer, Samsung, Sharp, PS3 - all perfect!
The thread about compliant AVCHD settings for Megui kinda died, too, i guess people just gave up on it.
I've never had problems with encoding to AVCHD with old versions of x264... seemingly just before it officially became Bluray-compliant! <:-)

[Ghitulescu]

@kaid:
This is your problem and it doesn't relate to the OT.

[sneaker_ger]

nvm..