LAV Filters - DirectShow Media Splitter and Decoders

[jmone]

Thinking out loud on these forced subs, is there any other info the splitter can determine, eg how big subtitle streams are, or the number of subs in each stream etc?

[jkauff]

LAV can play with any subtitles that are on the disc, the only problem is that a Blu-ray only tells you the language and nothing else, so it cannot auto-select the proper one and you may need to manually switch around.
Interesting. I wonder what PowerDVD does to automatically find the right subs?

[nevcairiel]

Thinking out loud on these forced subs, is there any other info the splitter can determine, eg how big subtitle streams are, or the number of subs in each stream etc?

No. How would it know that without reading the full disc first? Thats not exactly viable.

Interesting. I wonder what PowerDVD does to automatically find the right subs?

When you use the menu, it'll control which subs are loaded.

[jkauff]

When you use the menu, it'll control which subs are loaded.
What menu? I just select the folder and click Play.

I also used MakeMKV to create a version of the main movie that only had the English subs (including forced), but the players couldn't select the correct subs (including PowerDVD). Is that a Matroska problem, when you have multiple subs in the same language?

[jmone]

No. How would it know that without reading the full disc first? Thats not exactly viable.

No - scanning the disk is not a viable option, it was more wondering what meta data is available (if any) to the splitter on what each stream contains (eg size, # of subs). I'm guessing from your response there is NO meta data on the subtitle streams apart from LANG.

[ddjmagic]

What menu? I just select the folder and click Play.

I also used MakeMKV to create a version of the main movie that only had the English subs (including forced), but the players couldn't select the correct subs (including PowerDVD). Is that a Matroska problem, when you have multiple subs in the same language?

PowerDVD is told by the BD menu which subtitle track to play.

Without looking at the menus its not possible to correctly determine which subtitle track that is, same goes for the correct playlist.

Its not a problem with the MKV format, you need to mark the correct subtitle as forced, then the players will choose correctly.

[Pat357]

I ave a 1080p video that would not play using lav splitter. I installed 5.8 then 5.7 and it did not work. I then uninstalled lav spliiter and installed haali splitter then the video played fine. I only use lav as a splitter. This is the video info. Does anyone know why lav splitter refuses to work with this video ? The lav splitter icon does not show when I try to play this video.

Did you use the installer to install LAV-splitter ? If not, install it using the installer and try again.
What decoder are you using for the video ? What media player ? Have you tried to play it using LAV-video ?
If you suspect a possible bug in LAV-splitter and you want (Nev, anyone else ?) to have a look at it, please post a short sample.

Cut a part (10-30s seconds playback should be enough) from the large video using DGSpit or similar.
If the problem is also present in this short sample, upload it to Megaupload (or similar) and post a link to download it here.

No proper sample means no bugfix will be possible.

[hubblec4]

Hi Nev

Is LAV splitter able to handle

<!ELEMENT ChapterTranslate (
ChapterTranslateEditionUID,
ChapterTranslateCodec,
ChapterTranslateID)>

<!ELEMENT ChapterProcess (
ChapterProcessCodecID,
ChapterProcessPrivate?,
ChapterProcessCommand+)>

<!ELEMENT ChapterProcessCommand (
ChapterProcessTime,
ChapterProcessData)>

this are elements necessary to generate a "menu.xml"

and for menu need a "Control Track". can LAV this all do?

[nevcairiel]

LAV will simply ignore such elements, it does not do anything with them.

[Deihmos]

Did you use the installer to install LAV-splitter ? If not, install it using the installer and try again.
What decoder are you using for the video ? What media player ? Have you tried to play it using LAV-video ?
If you suspect a possible bug in LAV-splitter and you want (Nev, anyone else ?) to have a look at it, please post a short sample.

Cut a part (10-30s seconds playback should be enough) from the large video using DGSpit or similar.
If the problem is also present in this short sample, upload it to Megaupload (or similar) and post a link to download it here.

No proper sample means no bugfix will be possible.

I used the installer. I use ffdshow but just tried it with lav decoders with the same results. I use WMC but also tried WMP. The splitter does not load on this particular video but worked fine with all my other videos. I just did a simple and it still didn't work but worked fine using haali splitter. Here is a sample.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/61945547/Hansel%20and%20Gretel%20Witch%20Hunters_0.mkv

[jkauff]

PowerDVD is told by the BD menu which subtitle track to play.

Without looking at the menus its not possible to correctly determine which subtitle track that is, same goes for the correct playlist.

Its not a problem with the MKV format, you need to mark the correct subtitle as forced, then the players will choose correctly.
This is all beginning to make sense. Turns out the second eng subtitle track is NOT forced, so if I make an mkv with just that track and don't select "forced", it plays fine as long as subtitles are turned on in the player.

[nevcairiel]

I used the installer. I use ffdshow but just tried it with lav decoders with the same results. I use WMC but also tried WMP. The splitter does not load on this particular video but worked fine with all my other videos. I just did a simple and it still didn't work but worked fine using haali splitter. Here is a sample.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/61945547/Hansel%20and%20Gretel%20Witch%20Hunters_0.mkv

I tried your sample, and LAV loads it just fine for me.

[Deihmos]

I tried your sample, and LAV loads it just fine for me.

What version are you using? It does not load on 0.5.7 and 0.5.8. I tried it on 3 computers running windows 8 64 bit and it did not work on any of them.

[nevcairiel]

0.58 of course.

[Deihmos]

0.58 of course.

I just got it to play by disabling media foundation for mpeg. Something I do not have to do forany other video and I don't need to do it with haali splitter. Every video is playing fine without disabling media foundation. A bit strange.

[Omehenk]

http://puu.sh/3s2hj.jpg

don't get subtitles on mkv's. using w7 x64 and wmp.

[clsid]

Get Win7DSFilterTweaker and set the preferred H.264 video decoder to "Use merit". Then subtitles will work in WMP12.

It works without additional tweaks with Haali splitter because that provides its own workaround for the problem ("Autoload VSFilter" option). A similar workaround might one day be implemented in LAV Splitter/decoder.

[cyberbeing]

Just a guess, but do you use (xy-)VSFilter during playback as well? The sample file has subtitles, and (xy-)VSFilter doesn't support high-bitdepth 4:4:4 (http://code.google.com/p/xy-vsfilter/issues/detail?id=83) currently...
@Darkspace
Thanks & great guess. Confirmed on my side that xy-vsfilter is the culprit.

@nevcairiel
Thanks for taking a look & great work on LAV filters :)

@bwo_j
Since you use madVR, you would be better off enabling AYUV (8bit 4:4:4 YCbCr) output in LAV Video, rather than outputting RGB32. This would at least allow madVR to handle YCbCr -> RGB and TV range -> PC range conversations itself.

[ney2x]

I notice that newer build of MPC-HC 1.7.0.7545 has LAV Filters integrated. Thanks, this is what I'm waiting for... :)

[wanezhiling]

http://www.sendspace.com/file/izb4id
LAV Splitter outputs 720x720, not 1280x720.

[nevcairiel]

The file has a broken container AR, nothing can be done.

[AGKnotUser]

Using LAV Filters, madVR and Reclock with mpc-hc. It's all set up as in the Advanced MPC-HC Setup Guide. When I view an MKV file that has no subtitles but does have chapter titles. The chapter titles show as subtitles and show up as mkv.chapters.eng in the subtitles box. Is there a way to turn this off? If so, how?

Edit: Found the problem. When I muxed the MKV with MKVMerge I set the chapter file language to English. The "feature" in LAV Filters when set up according to the guide under subtitles makes the Chapter Name display as a subtitle. When I extracted and remuxed the MKV I left the language field blank in the Chapter file. This fixed the problem.

Edit2: I take that back. Now I don't know what the problem was. I only know it went away. When I played other files that also had the chapter file as English the subtitle problem didn't happen. I remuxed the original file with English turned on and it didn't show up in the subtitles either. I hate when things like that happen.

[pOpY]

Now that I've checked I get similar problem to yours with interlaced content, while having "Adaptive HW Deinterlacing" enabled, progressive content is ok.
Could you confirm this and try some progressive content and/or using YADIF instead?

Also a link to sample file might help inspect the issue. If it's something you don't publicly available, you could probably PM the link to either LAVFilters' or QuickSync Decoder's respective developer.

i can confirm that issue.
When "Adaptive HW Deinterlacing" is on the playback stutters on interlaced Live-TV and recordings.

Now i have disabled the "Adaptive HW Deinterlacing" and activated yadif.

I had some mediaportal stability problems on the htpc (i3-3450) using LAV Filters (newest version) in Windows 7x64.
Sometimes the evr.dll crashes!!

I have Intel QuickSync enabled, is it stable?
Or should ill go with DXVA2?

Whats the different of DXVA2 <-> intel QS?

thx
pOpY

[nevcairiel]

If you use QuickSync HW Deinterlacing you're on your own, more or less. You can report issues to egur in his own thread (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=162442), i just use his decoder and his deinterlacing functionality. The driver also has quite a bit influence on how it performs.
In general, you should just let your renderer do the deinterlacing and ignore any decoder deinterlacing, unless you have very good reasons for anything else.

I was personally a bit reluctant to enable the QuickSync deinterlacing because i know its not perfect, but people asked for it, so you got it at your own risk. :D

[pOpY]

If you use QuickSync HW Deinterlacing you're on your own, more or less. You can report issues to egur in his own thread (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=162442), i just use his decoder and his deinterlacing functionality. The driver also has quite a bit influence on how it performs.
In general, you should just let your renderer do the deinterlacing and ignore any decoder deinterlacing, unless you have very good reasons for anything else.

Ok, thx for clearing things up regarding Adaptive HW deinterlacing. Ill leave it off.

Are there also known stability issues with Intel QS decoder?

I had some mediaportal stability problems on the htpc (i3-3450) using LAV Filters (newest version) in Windows 7x64.
Sometimes the evr.dll crashes!!

I have Intel QuickSync enabled, is it stable?
Or should ill go with DXVA2?

Whats the different of DXVA2 <-> intel QS?

thx
pOpY

[mbordas]

The splitter option "Prefer Audio Stream with the Highest Quality" doesn't override if a stream is flagged forced, even if it's of less quality and doesn't match the language preference?

I wonder if that's the best functionality, since the user's preference may not match that of the person who encoded the file...

[nevcairiel]

Forced is not taken into account for audio.

In general it always tries to match your preferred languages, and only uses streams that match your configured languages, unless or course no stream matches your preferred languages.

The only thing that goes over quality is the default flag.

If it behaves any differently, check if your player is overwriting the stream choices.

[hubblec4]

hi Nev

here comes a question for a new feature (im sure its a lot of work).

Would you implement MKV-menu-DVD-style support?
dvd-menu is a normal feature of mkv.

in the attachments you will finde a info.xml(segmentinfo) and a menu.xml with dvd-style (chapters).

[nevcairiel]

There are no plans to support this.
Navigation like this doesn't really fit into the design of LAV Splitter, and implementing something like this in DirectShow is a hell of a lot of work.

[hubblec4]

There are no plans to support this.
Navigation like this doesn't really fit into the design of LAV Splitter, and implementing something like this in DirectShow is a hell of a lot of work.

something of that kind, I thought so.

but it is possible?

[nevcairiel]

Anything is possible in theory, its just a question of how much effort you want to invest.

[mbordas]

Forced is not taken into account for audio.

In general it always tries to match your preferred languages, and only uses streams that match your configured languages, unless or course no stream matches your preferred languages.

The only thing that goes over quality is the default flag.

If it behaves any differently, check if your player is overwriting the stream choices.

OK, true enough. But the point is the same, shouldnt the language and/or quality setting override the default flag as well?

[nevcairiel]

OK, true enough. But the point is the same, shouldnt the language and/or quality setting override the default flag as well?

Language overrides Default.

How would LAV know if you want the default flag to take precedence or not? In absence of that knowledge, LAV behaves according to the MKV specification.
I recommend to change the flags in the files if they are set wrong.

[mbordas]

Language overrides Default.



operator error. I never thought to explicitly set the language in the splitter, thought it just used the system setting. Thanks.

[Tom Keller]

Hi nevcairiel! Just out of curiosity:

Since FFmpeg and Libav supporting it now internally for a few months and since there seems to be no appropriate DirectShow decoder available - would it be possible to add decoding support for Apples Intermediate Codec (ICOD) (http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/attachments/final-cut-suite/14766d1256895819-convert-icod-pc-friendly-codec-clip.mov) to LAV Video?

[mindbomb]

question about using the dolby pro logic matrix encoding-
If you were planning to use it, is it best to just tick the box or should you also be mixing to 4.0/5.1 with it?
I presume pro logic and pro logic II require 4.0 and 5.1 input, right?

[nevcairiel]

Since FFmpeg and Libav supporting it now internally for a few months and since there seems to be no appropriate DirectShow decoder available - would it be possible to add decoding support for Apples Intermediate Codec (ICOD) (http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/attachments/final-cut-suite/14766d1256895819-convert-icod-pc-friendly-codec-clip.mov) to LAV Video?

I'll add it for the next version.

question about using the dolby pro logic matrix encoding-
If you were planning to use it, is it best to just tick the box or should you also be mixing to 4.0/5.1 with it?
I presume pro logic and pro logic II require 4.0 and 5.1 input, right?

Dolby Pro Logic is designed for downmixing 5.1 to stereo, so that is what you should also be doing. Its a very limited use-case really, where your PC only has a stereo connection to a DPL/DPLII decoder, which can reconstruct the multi-channel signal using the matrix.

[p750mmx]

@nevcairiel, a user with a zbox ID85 and Celeron 847 says that the Quick Sync option is available within the lav settings but the 847 hasn't got Quick Sync support build in according to Intel and many other sources? Could you maybe clarify how that Intel Quick Sync could be available with this CPU/GPU?

[nevcairiel]

Just be happy that it is?
I don't build the CPUs, but as far as I know only the encoder is missing on the cheapo CPUs.

[p750mmx]

So you think that the detection done by Lav on this Quick Sync option is correct with the Celeron 847 although Intel says it should be not available? Ok, Lav is even better then I already assumed ;)

[ariga]

Until 0.57 QuickSync acceleration was available in the video decoder. After installing 0.58 QS is no longer available! Reverted to 0.57 and it's working fine.

Running Windows 7 SP1 with
MPC - HC x86 Version: 1.6.8.7417 (f7c5f5e)
CPU: i5-2520M
Intel HD 3000 driver version: 8.15.10.2559

Will be glad to provide any additional information.

[InTheLight]

I have a feeling I'm probably on my own with this, but any ideas are much apreciated.

Trying to get mpc-hc+lav working. Xp32, quad-core, latest stable mpc, lav .58, amd ccc 13.1

When I use the lav-source spliter I always get patches of stuttering with blu-ray sources and I can't figure out why. If I use mpc-hc's internal spliter filter, the same blu-rays play flawlessly.

I've tried different combinations of renderers and a/v decoders
and the stuttering always originates from using the lav spliter.

Playing with the spliter settings doesn't prevent the stutter, nor is the system even remotely taxed when it happens. (Cpu~25%, gpu~30%)

Am I out of luck?:(

[khanmein]

guys, please kindly i need help cos whether i play .mkv it shown lav splitter (internal) low merit !!

http://i42.tinypic.com/2rdubub.png

[mindbomb]

When I use the lav-source spliter I always get patches of stuttering with blu-ray sources and I can't figure out why. If I use mpc-hc's internal spliter filter, the same blu-rays play flawlessly.


idk, try the mpc hc nightlies with lav splitter built in.

guys, please kindly i need help cos whether i play .mkv it shown lav splitter (internal) low merit !!



go to internal filters and check matroska.

[khanmein]

@mindbomb, i tested before it shown LAV Splitter Source (internal) but my bro laptop no need tick matroska it work likewise.

http://i39.tinypic.com/2zje5fl.png

[InsulinJunkie]

a user with a zbox ID85 and Celeron 847 says that the Quick Sync option is available within the lav settings but the 847 hasn't got Quick Sync support build in according to Intel and many other sources?

To expand on that a bit, Intel usually defines QuickSync support as having both the encoding/decoding hardware parts. The Sandy Bridge and later Celerons have the DEcoder part, but not the encoding part, so Intel doesn't classify them as having QuickSync.

[nevcairiel]

Until 0.57 QuickSync acceleration was available in the video decoder. After installing 0.58 QS is no longer available! Reverted to 0.57 and it's working fine.

Running Windows 7 SP1 with
MPC - HC x86 Version: 1.6.8.7417 (f7c5f5e)
CPU: i5-2520M
Intel HD 3000 driver version: 8.15.10.2559

Will be glad to provide any additional information.

Please report any issues with the QuickSync decoder to the author of said decoder, here:
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=162442

[khanmein]

@nevcairiel, lav splitter or mpc hc issue? how come i'm only the person face this issue? my lappy come with HD5650 should be able to support it.

y only mkv file gave me low merit? thanks.

[KoD]

I have a feeling I'm probably on my own with this, but any ideas are much apreciated.

Trying to get mpc-hc+lav working. Xp32, quad-core, latest stable mpc, lav .58, amd ccc 13.1

When I use the lav-source spliter I always get patches of stuttering with blu-ray sources and I can't figure out why. If I use mpc-hc's internal spliter filter, the same blu-rays play flawlessly.

I've tried different combinations of renderers and a/v decoders
and the stuttering always originates from using the lav spliter.

Playing with the spliter settings doesn't prevent the stutter, nor is the system even remotely taxed when it happens. (Cpu~25%, gpu~30%)

Am I out of luck?:(

I also have stutters when using recent LAV filters. I don't know if the splitter is at fault, because I have them even when using Haali's splitter (but, subjectively, less often). It could be anything, even the fact that I add audio delay in the LAVAudio decoder page (I sometime notice that the audio gets out of sync with the video, and then maybe later goes back to being in sync). Maybe when it gets back in sync it drops video frames, I don't know.

It's too time consuming to figure out what goes wrong, so what I do is that I use a combination that I know works well for me: Haali's splitter, and the video and audio decoders from a very old LAV package (0.51.3). Despite the constant updates, there really is no improvement in using a more recent version of the filters, whatever bugs get squashed never really end up in noticeable improvements.

My recommendation is to pick some combination of filters that works for you, and don't worry anymore.

[jkauff]

But then there'd be nothing to post about, and nev would have to find some other use for his spare time. :)