[SOLVED] MKV Playback Problems

[twiglet]

Hi I am having troubles playing MKV files in BSPlayer Pro 2.21 Build 950, I have searched the forums and they all suggest the same thing (install Haali), but this is not working for me. I get audio but no video and BSPlayer says it's an audio file where it usually has the "Movie size: 123 x 123" also the playback length displayed is greatly inflated to somewhere around 16 hours for a 2 hour video.

I am using the latest CCCP (2008-09-21) which has:

FFDShow tryout rev 2133 09-17-08
Haali 1.8.122.18

In addition to this I am using AC3 Filter 1.11

I have Haali set to autoload the filter and enable thumbnail extraction, everything else is standard settings.

All MKV files play in Media Player Classic and Windows Media Player with no problems.

I am running Windows XP x64 but i can't see how this would be a problem as everything else works fine!

Any help would be great as I would really like to use BSPlayer to watch these files and not have to switch to another player just to watch files I should be able to play in software I have payed for!

[Tizio]

Try to update your BSplayer version first

[twiglet]

I am now using 2.31 Build 974.

It now works but I think there may be a problem with the network buffer. I am playing a file over the network with a buffer of 300mb the file is 4.37GB which if my maths is correct should buffer up around 8mins of the file if it is 2 hours long, I left it for 10 mins but it did not catch up enough to play. I have disabled the buffer and it works fine, so thanks for the help getting them working, I thought I had the latest but it seems I was wrong!

My network is a 1GBit wired network with (currently no other traffic) distributed with a 1GBit switch so there is no problem with bandwidth... also proven by the fact it streams fine.

I don't know if this is the cotrrect place to post this but hopefully someone may notice!

[Tizio]

It depends on the amount of buffer you enabled in BSplayer preferences and on the speed of you network (not the nominal speed, but the real one)

If your net speed is 1Gbit, it mean that it can ideally handle a transfer rate of 120MB/s, so it should load the entire movie in less than 1 minute, but you also have to take into consideration the speed loss in the net, the real read speed of your original media (if you load the movie from a DVD drive over a net connection and you can read from that drive at 6x it means you read 8MB/s instead of 120MB/s, that means it will take 10 minutes to read that disk)

Yes, 10 minutes to read 300MB is really toooooo much (it means 0,5 MB/s, less than 1x DVD speed)

Your maths are correct for the amount of time available on the 300MB buffer, but not for the transfer time (that depends on the system you are using)

Try to lower the buffer percentage prior to play the movie (CTRL+P -> General -> Network buffer -> Prebuffer (%) -> set it to 10% which is 30MB if the buffer is 300MB), then with the preferences page opened load the movie and see if the "Buffer status" changes from N/A to a percentage (there you'll be able to see the amount of data transferred to BSplayer buffer)
Be sure to have enabled the right options in Network buffer preferences (enable not only the first option, "Enable network buffering", but also all the other drives)

[twiglet]

I understand the network speeds, I was simply stating it just so that it wasn't blamed on network speeds :)

The files are being served from hdds in raid 5 on the server so there should be no speed problems from there.

I had the pre buffer at 50% and I've now set the pre buffer to 10% of 300mb. I have also set it for network and fixed drives as I have the network shares mounted and didn't know if BS Player would know the difference.

While checking the status when loading a xvid encoded avi (350MB) the file starts playing the first few seconds of the file briefly pauses (1 sec or so) when the buffer is at 0% then starts playing at 10% but with the x264 encoded mkv (4.37GB) it didn't start until it reached a full 100% taking about 10 seconds.

Not really a problem just wondering if there is a way of making it handle it a bit more gracefully.

[Tizio]

:shock: no, absolutely no transfer speed :D
I don't know, I have to investigate on this since ATM I can't access a network to try, but I'll do ;)