[mythtv-users] MPEG4 transcode - lost subtitles and additional audio tracks

[Richard Freeman]

Bill Williamson wrote:
> MPEG-4 is a video compression codec, not a container.  MKV (which
> mythtv has horrible support for) supports multiple audio streams and
> multiple subtitle streams.  AVI does not officially support multiple
> audio streams, but has been "unofficially extended" to allow for it.

Myth's internal player isn't terribly flexible - it requires keyframes
at fixed intervals and breaks on all kind of transcoded content that
plays just fine on mplayer.  I've almost given up on trying to transcode
HD content to SD while preserving AC3 audio - the resulting files play
just fine in just about everything but mythtv, but then you can't
commercial-skip or use other nice features like position saving/etc.

It would be really nice if the internal player supported a bigger
variety of formats.  I wonder if myth could just use something else like
xine or mplayer to play the video files, and then just remote-control
that software to accomplish skips/etc.  Then you'd automatically get the
feature-set of the other software and myth wouldn't have to be
yet-another-media-player that tries to outdo the big players...