[mythtv-users] MythGallery: "Timed out waiting for frames" playing MJPEG

[Roger Siddons]

On Mon, 21 May 2012 08:23:59 +0100, Raffaele BELARDI  
<raffaele.belardi at st.com> wrote:

> On 05/20/2012 10:20 PM, Roger Siddons wrote:
>>> On 05/14/2012 09:05 AM, Raffaele Belardi wrote:
>>>> After the move to 0.25 playback of the videos recorded from my still
>>>> camera in MythGallery is awful: Internal player plays a couple of
>>>> seconds, then stops audio and video, then continues, then stops again
>>>> and so on. The log is full of "Timed out waiting for frames, and There
>>>> are not enough free frames, discarding buffered frames".
>>>>
>>>> mplayer plays the same files without issues. No problem playing AVIs 
>>>> nor
>>>> high quality mkv with Internal player. Live TV is ok.
>> _______________________________________________
>>
>> Yes. I also noticed this a few days ago.
>>
>> My camera generates MOV files which produce the problems you describe.
>> Some of these I have compressed to AVI files (for web posting) and these
>> also have the stutter. However other (downloaded) AVI files play 
>> perfectly
>> in Myth, as do other formats. All these 'problem files' play perfectlyin
>> VLC and mythffplay.
>>
>> So is it an issue with MythVideo playing files produced by cameras ?
>>
>> I used VLC to play these movies in 0.24 but I don't remember why - Imust
>> have had some issues back then as well.
>>
>> More worryingly, I can't seem to change the MythGallery player any more-
>> it no longer appears to respect the Video File Type settings in 0.25.If  
>> I
>> copy a camera video to my 'videos' directory it plays using VLC (as
>> configured). However the same video in my 'pictures' directory always
>> invokes the Internal player.
>>
>> I've attached a "-v playback --loglevel debug" log. The "60 Hz Display
>> Refresh Rate" is alarming (I'm using UK PAL) but it seems to report this
>> for playable videos as well, so I'm not sure what this really means.
>>
>> http://pastebin.com/rKBegn3T
>
> Well, at least I'm not the only one!

Maybe no-one else has vain kids (& doting grandparents) that want to spend  
hours watching themselves. The dev's don't seem interested in this  
MythVideo issue either - so much for the "use it for everything" push...

>
> Like you I'm unable to specify the player for MythGallery.
>

I had a quick look at this problem today. This was an intentional change  
for 0.25 (changeset) although I can't find the reason for it.

> Unlike you I was successful re-encoding the MJPEG to MPEG with mencoder:
> playback of re-encoded movies is fine in MythGallery, although the video
> quality is not as good as the original (but that's a mencoder issue).
>

I presumed there would be  some way of processing them but I'm not going  
to re-encode 300 films just so that I can use Myth!
I was contemplating dusting my coding fingers off to undo the above change  
but I'll probably start looking for an external app to use instead. Any  
recommendations anyone ?

> I also was using mplayer for camera movies under 0.24 because the
> internal player was not able to play them.
>
> In your log there are lots of "Video is xxx frames ahead of audio"
> messages, maybe there is a problem decoding the audio? On my camera
> movies I think it's 8-bit PCM, mono. I could try to re-encode only the
> audio to a more common format (e.g. mp3).
>
> I just noticed that your log contains some errors:
>
> E ALSA: Setting hardware audio buffer size to 6016
> E ALSA: Error opening /proc/asound/card0/pcm0p/sub0/prealloc:
> Permission denied.
> E ALSA: Try to manually increase audio buffer with: echo 6016 | sudo
> tee /proc/asound/card0/pcm0p/sub0/prealloc
> E ALSA: Unable to sufficiently increase ALSA hardware buffer size -
> underruns are likely
>
> Could be related to our problem? I'll check my logs also.
>

I doubt it. I looked into this a long time ago (0.23?) - it was a common  
'feature', I believe. My system has always produced these messages for TV,  
videos etc and yet I have never had problems with anything else.

> raffaele
> _______________________________________________
> mythtv-users mailing list
> mythtv-users at mythtv.org
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FWIW I've tried several cameras and they all fail to play properly.
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