LAV Filters - DirectShow Media Splitter and Decoders

[aufkrawall]

Was schannel used before gnutls, but dropped due to onging problems with ffmpeg?

mbedtls serves me well in ffmpeg, but I suppose you got good reasons for gnutls. :)

[ashlar42]

Hi nevcariel, I'm trying to understand what the best road to bring madVR to Kodi, now that the DSPlayer fork seems to be dead for the foreseeable future.

While inquiring about the possibility of madVR as a binary add-on for Kodi, I got this answer (https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=335218&pid=2838575#pid2838575) from what used to be the main Kodi videoplayer coder.
At least from a theoretical point of view, it appears that having madVR as an "external" video renderer could be doable.

Which leads me to my question: if I understand things correctly, madVR "counts" on LAV Filters to pass on relevant info for proper HDR playback. Is this correct? Is this info coming from regular FFMPEG or is it your work. In the second case, do you see that part of your work moving upstream to FFMPEG main codebase (as Kodi is based on that too)?

If all of the above doesn't make sense, I'm sorry. Unfortunately I'm not a coder, I'm investigating this only to understand what would theoretically would be possible. Hoping that sooner or later an interested coder might look into it.

[nevcairiel]

FFmpeg extracts most of the information already, it would just be a matter of bringing it into a format that madVR understands. This format was defined in collaboration between madshi and myself, and it has no place in FFmpeg. All that would have to be implemented in the adapter between Kodi and madVR.
That said, madVR is not only a video renderer, but a DirectShow one, as such it expects a lot of particular behavior in a particular way, often not very obvious, trying to get Kodi to act like a DirectShow source that pushes data to madVR might be rather prone to a lot of complexity, so its not a task I would take lightly, or enjoy personally, for that matter.

Unfortunately, the number of developers working on free or even open-source DirectShow stuff can probably be counted on one hand, and any attempts at attracting new developers to help continue players like MPC-HC has already proven rather fruitless, as is perhaps also evident by the death of DSPlayer itself. Regardless, good luck!

[oldpainlesskodi]

Unfortunately, the number of developers working on free or even open-source DirectShow stuff can probably be counted on one hand, and any attempts at attracting new developers to help continue players like MPC-HC has already proven rather fruitless, as is perhaps also evident by the death of DSPlayer itself. Regardless, good luck!

The current version of Dsplayer still works. The only thing that changes is the lack of any new features from the main Kodi branch, as well as some of the addons.

But, there are a lot of people, myself included, that only use Dsplayer for local file playback, so I'll let go of Dsplayer, with Lav and MadVR, when hell freezes over ;)

[ashlar42]

That said, madVR is not only a video renderer, but a DirectShow one, as such it expects a lot of particular behavior in a particular way, often not very obvious, trying to get Kodi to act like a DirectShow source that pushes data to madVR might be rather prone to a lot of complexity, so its not a task I would take lightly, or enjoy personally, for that matter.Yeah, even though (sadly) I'm not a coder, I understand it would be a complex task. I hope that the existing DSPlayer codebase could give hints on how to proceed but I'm not sure (as DSPlayer completely substitutes Kodi videoplayer with DirectShow).
Unfortunately, the number of developers working on free or even open-source DirectShow stuff can probably be counted on one hand, and any attempts at attracting new developers to help continue players like MPC-HC has already proven rather fruitless, as is perhaps also evident by the death of DSPlayer itself. Regardless, good luck!Thanks. More than offering $500 in order to make the project go on I cannot do. And I understand that's not the kind of money that could generate motivation for something like this. But thanks for the info you provided and thanks for your wish of good luck. :)

[ashlar42]

On a different subject, this time exclusively concerning LAV Filters, I hope you can help me understand something, nevcariel.

I'm experimenting in using Google Drive as a source for video content (paid tier, not the free one). I am seeing some "strange" behavior when using LAV Splitter. If I open videos from Kodi, they generate a limited number of accesses on opening the file (3 or 4 typically). If I open them from MPC-HC, using LAV, I see potentially many more "download events", as Google calls them. I have the impression that this might be linked with the number of chapters in a given mkv file, but I'm not sure. Does any of this ring any bell? Is LAV "calling" a file multiple times before opening it for playback?
Thanks.

[nevcairiel]

Opening a file and reading its headers involves a number of seeks - in particular with MKV files (and also MP4 files), because they contain header information both in the beginning, and at the end of the file.
Over HTTP, a seek is a new request, so depending on the exact file structure, this could be a few requests. I have already optimized LAV to avoid seeks during straight playback, so that after it was opened and probed, it will play it straight through from start to finish in one request - however seek requests during startup cannot really be avoided without removing features.

[ashlar42]

Opening a file and reading its headers involves a number of seeks - in particular with MKV files (and also MP4 files), because they contain header information both in the beginning, and at the end of the file.
Over HTTP, a seek is a new request, so depending on the exact file structure, this could be a few requests. I have already optimized LAV to avoid seeks during straight playback, so that after it was opened and probed, it will play it straight through from start to finish in one request - however seek requests during startup cannot really be avoided without removing features.Thanks for your reply. I was imagining something similar. The only thing I don't understand is why, apparently, Kodi's internal VideoPlayer is generating less requests. Could that have to do with (lack of) MKV branching support (editions.... how are the multiple versions of a movie inside a single file called). Maybe LAV needs to check for that and Kodi doesn't?
This is just "academic" curiosity, by the way. Your reply was thorough and I surely don't want LAV to remove features. :)

[sneaker_ger]

Maybe it reads the beginning and end of file in bigger chunks into the buffer and then seeks to the specific header elements from that buffer?

[groen]

Can lav filters work on freebsd or is there a freebsd build? If not what is lacking in freebsd that means there can not be a lav filters for freebsd? Thank you.

[nevcairiel]

LAV Filters is Windows-only. It uses key windows components to function, as such there will never be a build for anything but Windows. In fact its entire premise is being a DirectShow filter - no DirectShow on BSD, no LAV Filters.

[Blight]

I am testing LAV Filters support for DSF/DSD/DXD high resolution audio and have some issues,

In graph studio:
1. I add LAV Splitter Source
2. I specify a previously downloaded sound ".dsf" file from here: http://www.2l.no/hires/
3. I connect the newly exposed Audio pin on the source filter to LAV Audio Decoder.
4. I try to connect the LAV Audio Decoder to the "default directsound" audio renderer and get an error:


[Window Title]
Connecting Pins

[Main Instruction]
VFW_E_UNSUPPORTED_AUDIO (0x8004025C)

[Content]
Cannot play back the audio stream: the audio format is not supported.
Connecting Pins (decimal -2147220900)


I tried with mixing enabled and disabled with no difference.
I suspect it may be the high bitrate not being supported by the audio driver, but I have hoped some down-mixing fallback would be in place for such cases.

[nevcairiel]

LAV does not offer resampling, so whatever audio renderer you are using would need to cope with the DSD sampling rates. On that note, downsampling is not the only thing you should be doing. DSD is full of ultrasonic noise, and you absolutely should apply a strong low-pass filter to get it out of the signal before resampling it, otherwise it'll cause audible distortions.

[ashlar42]

nevcariel, is there a possibility in the future for LAV Filters to offer an option to cache completely a file on a local hard drive for playback? Kodi's VideoPlayer offers this but I'm not sure if this is something that, in the DirectShow world, would be handled by the source/splitter filter or if it needs to be handled by the player itself.
Hoping this has not been asked in the past. Thank you.

[huhn]

you can already do something like that with the queue settings it's using the ram for that.

queue memory is the file size and queue packets the maximum number of "frames".

[juffi]

My setup: MPC-HC / MPC-BE (v1.5.3, build 4455), LAV Filters (0.73.1.30-git), MadVR. Intel NUC7i3BNK, Intel i3-7100U, Intel graphics driver 25.20.100.6618. Windows 10 Pro 1809.

3D MVC used to work a few week ago with the earlier Intel driver (v 6577). Now, when I start playback of an iso image, MPC-BE says: "Starting playback crashed". After 10 seconds or so playback starts without any audio. Changing playback position, and most any change, freezes playback completely. Closing the application thru task manager.

3D playback works nicely with Kodi. PowerDVD works but there is strange motion judder.

Is this LAV Filters problem or something else? Maybe caused by a Windows 10 change.

[ashlar42]

you can already do something like that with the queue settings it's using the ram for that.

queue memory is the file size and queue packets the maximum number of "frames".Yeah, I know about that and we've discussed this briefly here in the past weeks.

My problem is that nowadays RAM cannot necessarily be enough for current media (even with 32GB, which is currently, I believe, kind of the upper limit for "sane" installations). Summed to the fact that settings there are rather... opaque about how they actually impact cache size (I'm not sure they are limitless and I'm not sure how the two values interact among each other in order to define cache size, if there's clear documentation I must have missed it).

But mainly the first point. The second is more of a "if there was a "cache everything to disk as fast as possible" option everything would be easier for people with that kind of necessity".

[nevcairiel]

I don't have any plans for such a feature, sorry. Someone could write a file source filter that sits before LAV that does that, if one really wanted to.

[el Filou]

nowadays RAM cannot necessarily be enough for current media (even with 32GB).Apart from Blu-rays I don't see any media that wouldn't fit in 32 GB of RAM and even then, using a reasonable buffer of 24 GB you could buffer from 1/4 to 1/2 of the movie. Are you saying your network is so bad that 24 GBs of buffer still would cause drops? If yes then I would advise on manually copying your file to local storage before playback, or just permanently moving your media storage to the playback device.settings there are rather... opaque about how they actually impact cache size (I'm not sure they are limitless and I'm not sure how the two values interact among each other in order to define cache size, if there's clear documentation I must have missed it).The settings are not opaque at all as they were described in detail the last time we discussed it:
https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1865530#post1865530
Even just the tooltips in LAV config are pretty self-explanatory.
Basically: set Maximum Queue Memory to the max RAM you want to use for buffering, then use the highest bitrate (and feature-length playtime) file you have to test while increasing Maximum Queue Packets until the player process uses up that amount of RAM.
I just did a test again: with a 25 Mbps UHD mkv, you need a ~20.000 paquet queue for a 2 GB buffer (which already holds 10 minutes of material), and it takes just 30 seconds of playback for MPC-HC to fill it up (from local HDD). Something like a 250.000 paquet queue should let you fill up a 24 GB buffer (leaving a bit of RAM for the other apps :D).

[lvqcl]

an option to cache completely a file on a local hard drive for playback?

"cache everything to disk as fast as possible" option

It's not clear for me what you want.

Do you want an option to read a file from a local HDD and cache it in RAM? Or an option to read a stream from network and cache it in a local HDD?

[ashlar42]

I don't have any plans for such a feature, sorry. Someone could write a file source filter that sits before LAV that does that, if one really wanted to.Thanks for your reply nevcariel. Not being a developer (absolutely far from it), I can't judge how tough of a job this would be.
From the top of my absolute ignorance, it doesn't sound too hard but, as mentioned, I have no clue. :)

It's not clear for me what you want.

Do you want an option to read a file from a local HDD and cache it in RAM? Or an option to read a stream from network and cache it in a local HDD?

The second one. Cache it all on a local HDD from a network source, downloading it as fast as the network allows (throttling options might be useful for somebody but I personally don't care too much and I'd be fine with an "all or nothing" approach).

Apart from Blu-rays I don't see any media that wouldn't fit in 32 GB of RAM and even then, using a reasonable buffer of 24 GB you could buffer from 1/4 to 1/2 of the movie. Are you saying your network is so bad that 24 GBs of buffer still would cause drops?Nope, my network is gigabit fiber and it really works at gigabit speeds. The reason I want to cache as much as possible is to avoid too many "pings" on the source, as those create problems of a different kind than playback performance (ie. API limits).
el Filou;1871400]The settings are not opaque at all as they were described in detail the last time we discussed it:
https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1865530#post1865530
Even just the tooltips in LAV config are pretty self-explanatory.
Basically: set Maximum Queue Memory to the max RAM you want to use for buffering, then use the highest bitrate (and feature-length playtime) file you have to test while increasing Maximum Queue Packets until the player process uses up that amount of RAM.
I just did a test again: with a 25 Mbps UHD mkv, you need a ~20.000 paquet queue for a 2 GB buffer (which already holds 10 minutes of material), and it takes just 30 seconds of playback for MPC-HC to fill it up (from local HDD). Something like a 250.000 paquet queue should let you fill up a 24 GB buffer (leaving a bit of RAM for the other apps :D).Ok, I concede... it's not settings that are opaque. My brain more likely is. Thanks for the in depth reply. I'll test this (although on my HTPC I have "only" 16GB), this is much appreciated.
Edit: although... from a local source (thus speed not being a problem), setting 16,000 MB and 250,000 packets has MPC-HC x64 stopping at about 4,2 GB of RAM used. Maybe there's a limit in LAV Filters? Maybe the format of the variable doesn't allow for such a big number?

[nevcairiel]

Edit: although... from a local source (thus speed not being a problem), setting 16,000 MB and 250,000 packets has MPC-HC x64 stopping at about 4,2 GB of RAM used. Maybe there's a limit in LAV Filters? Maybe the format of the variable doesn't allow for such a big number?

There was actually a bug with such huge values, I've fixed it for the next nightly, and it successfully buffers a full BD file at 20GB for me now.
One thing to note however is that the buffer is not "smart", if you seek it'll drop the entire buffer, do the seek in the actual file, and then re-fill the buffer from scratch. Due to that behavior, seeking is actually really slow, since freeing tens of thousands of small memory blocks is actually quite an intensive task to do. Hence why the default buffer sizes are only as big as I dare make them, since it can slow stuff down.

[ashlar42]

There was actually a bug with such huge values, I've fixed it for the next nightly, and it successfully buffers a full BD file at 20GB for me now.
One thing to note however is that the buffer is not "smart", if you seek it'll drop the entire buffer, do the seek in the actual file, and then re-fill the buffer from scratch. Due to that behavior, seeking is actually really slow, since freeing tens of thousands of small memory blocks is actually quite an intensive task to do. Hence why the default buffer sizes are only as big as I dare make them, since it can slow stuff down.Thanks nevcariel. I'm not surprised that this bug wasn't "caught" before. It surely is an "extreme" usage. And you are right, I remember you mentioning this before: it's probably not the correct way to go having such a huge buffer, for the reasons you describe.

This is why I was inquiring about disk caching (to which you've already answered). :)

[VipZ]

Hi nevcairiel

I have switched to VS 2019 to test it out and found it no longer has the Win 8.1 SDK as an option.

I had then tested using the Win 10.0.17763.0 SDK and all seems to work for both LAV and libbluray.

While all seems to work thought I would ask if you think there could be some issue by changing the SDK like this.

MPC-BE allows one to set the SDK via environment variable, could this approach be useful for LAV as well if its fully expected to work?

Thanks

[nevcairiel]

I don't really expect problems from using the Windows 10 SDK, but I have not validated it yet to make sure it still runs on all old platforms as expected.
I did however just make a change to always select the latest Windows 10 SDK when running with VS2019, since indeed the 8.1 SDK is no longer present.

[VipZ]

Thanks for the quick update.

[juffi]

LAV Filters do not work with 3D MVC. MPC-BE with internal filters work but with LAV Filters not, otherwise same setup.

MPC-HC / MPC-BE (v1.5.3, build 4455), LAV Filters (0.73.1.30-git), MadVR. Intel NUC7i3BNK, Intel i3-7100U, Intel graphics driver 25.20.100.6618. Windows 10 Pro 1809.

[LigH]

And you installed the non-default MVC pack?

https://frupic.frubar.net/shots/37969.png

[nevcairiel]

You're on a old version of LAV Filters, 0.74.1 has since been released. Additionally, ensure that you actually have the MVC decoder component installed inside the LAV folder, otherwise it might not find it.
Otherwise, all I can say is that it works for me.

[Manni]

Not only for you, it's been working for most for a while now, but as you say the optional component has to be downloaded during install :)

[RealSnoopyDog]

nevcariel, is there a possibility in the future for LAV Filters to offer an option to cache completely a file on a local hard drive for playback?

What sense would it make to download every file first before you can start playing it back? This may cause many problems
Copyright violations
Waiting for hours before playback starts, depending on the file size.
For internet streams, there isn't always a "file" to download, it is just a stream.


It is not the job of the splitter to handle such things. If you are using software like DVBViewer which handles things transparent, you can store an internet stream as a normal DVB channel so you can also record it on your local disk.

[huhn]

that's not how a buffer would work it doesn't delay playback it just doesn't stop buffering until the stream ends. this works for live streaming too it just downloads everything that's available at the given time.

[ashlar42]

What sense would it make to download every file first before you can start playing it back? This may cause many problems
Copyright violations
Waiting for hours before playback starts, depending on the file size.
For internet streams, there isn't always a "file" to download, it is just a stream.


It is not the job of the splitter to handle such things. If you are using software like DVBViewer which handles things transparent, you can store an internet stream as a normal DVB channel so you can also record it on your local disk.I'm talking about my videos, in cloud storage. Don't know what you meant with "copyright violations" but I'm talking about personal files, not Neflix/Prime Video/YouTube.
Playback starts as soon as you start playback, as huhn explained the disk buffer would fill up as playback goes on.
As explained above, my use case would not be with internet "streams" in the way you thought it would.

[RealSnoopyDog]

Ah, ok. But even this is not a thing that a splitter should do. This is something that the playback software can handle.

If you have (e.g.) a copy of a 1920x1080 movie encoded in h.264, then 20-30 GB of data needs to be copied over the network to a local storage on the PC when playback starts. When playback is finished regulary, the the local copy needs to be deleted and so on. And what happens if the disc is full, because the files didn't get deleted?

Playback starts as soon as you start playback, as huhn explained the disk buffer would fill up as playback goes on.
But then this option wouldn't make any sense, it only produces more useless overhead and IO accesses.

When you start playback from a "cloud" storage and the network speed is fast enough (the "player" or "consumer" reads the data slower than it gets delivered from the storage) then playback will start immediately.
If the network speed is too slow ("player" or "consumer" reads faster than the data gets transmitted), then you need to wait until a buffer got filled. Playback can not start immediately in this case even if the buffer gets filled in the background because the player will consume the data in the buffer faster than it gets filled.

@huhn: he said that he wants to have an option for a buffer that holds a complete copy of a file on the local disk and gets filled when playback starts. This doesn't make any sense. And he said that his scenario wouldn't violate any copyright things but what you wrote would definitely (possibly) violate copyright.

[huhn]

you are aware that lavfilter is already able todo all these things. the difference is it will use the ram not the disc first. so it will fill your ram to the maximum and the system will then switch to the harddisk to buffer the rest which my result in playback issues which would not be the case if the buffer would use directly the harddisk.

so does this violate copy right whatever thingy somewhere on earth maybe i don't care.
there is no word to use it on slow internet he just wants the connection to do the whole act in one transfer as fast as possible. normal access may start and stop transfer all the time.

[juffi]

Not only for you, it's been working for most for a while now, but as you say the optional component has to be downloaded during install :)

Sure I have loaded that. LAV Filters used to work a few weeks ago, but not anymore. I installed the new LAV Filters version but it did not help. For some reason the internal filters stopped working as well. Today I once managed to get perfect playback with LAV Video decoder and other filters internal. Problem could be in the audio filter and Intel drivers.

Kodi 3D works perfectly.

[Grimsdyke]

Just wanted to watch the Arrow-US-BluRay of Romero's THE CRAZIES and there is a problem that I only have with one other Blu-Ray (so far).
- MPC-BE and LAV filters => one audio track falsely identified as an mp3-file !!! Trying to play the film using this audio freezes MPC-BE !!
- MPC-BE and LAV Splitter blocked => audio correctly identified as PCM. Movie plays fine.

Only if I directly load the movie file located in the stream folder on the disc playback is fine with MPC-BE and LAV so I think there must be something in the authoring
of the disc that throws LAV off-track since BE's internal filter seem to have no problems. Does anyone maybe knows what's causing this and ideally how to fix it ??

[foxyshadis]

What sense would it make to download every file first before you can start playing it back? This may cause many problems
Copyright violations
Waiting for hours before playback starts, depending on the file size.
For internet streams, there isn't always a "file" to download, it is just a stream.


It is not the job of the splitter to handle such things. If you are using software like DVBViewer which handles things transparent, you can store an internet stream as a normal DVB channel so you can also record it on your local disk.

Turn on mobile data/tethering -> download -> turn off mobile data/tethering. Ten years ago, it would have been spin up the disk, read it all, spin down.

Only the most naive filters would ever have fully buffered before releasing the buffer. Start the download, start playing when requested, these operations aren't connected. Isn't this how many streams work today? What's important is that it keeps downloading constantly until finished, not

[RealSnoopyDog]

My PC doesn't use mobile data or tethering and I did not install LAV on my mobile phone
You didn't follow the discussion. The person who requested this wrote that he would like to have a feature which FULLY downloads FILES before the software should start playing back.

[huhn]

no he just wants an full file disk buffer.
https://forum.doom9.org/showpost.php?p=1871605&postcount=23476

[clsid]

Copy to local harddrive or a dynamic ramdrive (using ImDisk).

[RealSnoopyDog]

Sorry, then maybe his wording (a disc buffer that can hold a full copy of a file) was misunderstanding. Buffering is of course always good for streaming. In memory buffering is better than disc buffering. And buffering never helps out of the conflict that you have on slow/bad internet connections when the consumer (player) needs the data faster than the producer can deliver it.

[lvqcl]

I cannot access files.1f0.de and git.1f0.de hosts:

NET::ERR_CERT_DATE_INVALID, the certificate has expired.

[nevcairiel]

The certs were updated, but the script failed to reload the webserver. Oh well.

[khanmein]

@nevcairel I tried to play this particular clip (https://www.elecard.com/storage/video/Stream2_AV1_HD_6.8mbps.webm), when right-click the Filters > LAV Video Decoder (Internal), it's normal? Thanks & cheers.

http://i64.tinypic.com/24n2vwj.png

As far as I'm concerned, the LAV Splitter Source is 'Internal'.

[sneaker_ger]

It's normal. It just means MPC-HC is using LAV Video with its "internal" settings (from 1.8.1 on it also allows external LAV as "internal"). LAV Splitter, LAV Video and LAV Audio all can be loaded as "internal".

[khanmein]

It's normal. It just means MPC-HC is using LAV Video with its "internal" settings (from 1.8.1 on it also allows external LAV as "internal"). LAV Splitter, LAV Video and LAV Audio all can be loaded as "internal".

For the particular AV1 clip only and there rest MKV don't show the internal word.

[sneaker_ger]

Maybe your external LAV is too old for AV1 or you have "AV1" checked in MPC-HC "Options"->"Internal Filters"->"Transform Filters" but not for other formats. DirectShow filter selection process is complicated ...

[khanmein]

Maybe your external LAV is too old for AV1 or you have "AV1" checked in MPC-HC "Options"->"Internal Filters"->"Transform Filters" but not for other formats. DirectShow filter selection process is complicated ...

I'm using the latest nightly LAVFilters-0.74.1-12 and AV1 is ticked. I've tested to uncheck AV1 and the internal word is disappeared.

Should I uncheck everything in the "Internal Filters"?

[sneaker_ger]

It's hard to give advice because there isn't really much of a difference between "internal" and external LAV. Personally, I have deleted the LAV Filters subfolder within the MPC-HC folder and disabled all transform filters to make sure I only have 1 set of LAV/LAV settings.