Can't play Person of Interest .mkv, other .mkvs work fine

[BondEar]

So I downloaded the HD version of Person of Interest:
http://vodo.net/personofinterest
It has h264 video and AVC audio contained within a Matroska file.

For some reason I can't get it to play in either Totem or mplayer, even though I've been able to play other Matroska files fine in both of them. Totem does nothing but display a black window. gmplayer displays a blue screen and there's a silouette where the control buttons are supposed to be. Also it takes about 20 seconds to close it. When I try to get the properties on it, it says "Creating properties window. You can cancel this operation by clicking cancel." and it won't show the properties no matter how long I wait.

When I try to run it in mplayer from the command line, it says a bunch of these:

Code: Select all

[h264 @ 0xb40fa0]AVC: nal size 29922113
[h264 @ 0xb40fa0]no frame!
Error while decoding frame!

All at the same hex location, but with seemingly random "nal sizes." Then it ends with this:

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Too many audio packets in the buffer: (4097 in 1648030 bytes).
Maybe you are playing a non-interleaved stream/file or the codec failed?
For AVI files, try to force non-interleaved mode with the -ni option.
A:   0.1 V:   0.0 A-V:  0.107 ct:  0.000   0/  0 ??% ??% ??,?% 421 0 

Exiting... (End of file)

Running Debian 5.0.6 and MPlayer dev-SVN-r26940. See if you can run it, it's available under a Creative Commons license from the link above.

[julian67]

You might not get many people interested in downloading a file between 2 and 3 GB in size just to answer your questions....I'm not going to because I already exceeded my ISP's monthly cap and it's only the tenth of the month

How about offering some useful info on the file? Here is one way to do so:

Code: Select all

mplayer -ss 300 -vo null -frames 1 -nosound -identify <your_video_file>

which in English is mplayer starting at 300 seconds, no video display, no sound, 1 frame, outputting some info about the file. Post the output and we can see some info about the movie.

I suspect that the movie is 720p HD h.264 with aac audio in a recent version of the matroska container. Debian Lenny's version of mplayer is now positively ancient and older versions of mplayer can definitely have difficulties with demuxing matroska (actually the latest mplayer also has some issues but broadly speaking it plays everything so no big deal). And HD support is somewhere between non-existent and extremely poor in Lenny's mplayer. If you're running a PIII or PIV or AMD Duron or old Athlon or some other single core system then forget about playing HD in Lenny using only packages from Debian repos.

[BondEar]

After some error messages about joystick support and remote controls, it says this:

Code: Select all

MPlayer dev-SVN-r26940
CPU: AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 955 Processor (Family: 16, Model: 4, Stepping: 3)
CPUflags:  MMX: 1 MMX2: 1 3DNow: 1 3DNow2: 1 SSE: 1 SSE2: 1
Compiled with runtime CPU detection.
Can't open joystick device /dev/input/js0: No such file or directory
Can't init input joystick
mplayer: could not connect to socket
mplayer: No such file or directory
Failed to open LIRC support. You will not be able to use your remote control.

Playing ./Person.of.Interest.2010.720p.x264-VODO.
Seek failed


Exiting... (End of file)

That's all it says. Also I do have a fairly recent processor as it says and I have been able to play other HD videos.

[julian67]

Playing ./Person.of.Interest.2010.720p.x264-VODO.
Seek failed

Person.of.Interest.2010.720p.x264-VODO. should almost certainly be Person.of.Interest.2010.720p.x264-VODO.mkv so try again, making sure you give mplayer the right argument (complete file name). Use tab completion in preference to typing it out.

[Bro.Tiag]

You might not get many people interested in downloading a file between 2 and 3 GB in size just to answer your questions....I'm not going to because I already exceeded my ISP's monthly cap and it's only the tenth of the month

I'm one of those lucky ones with no isp throttling and unlimited download/uploading so I grab your film. Works fine on sid, so as julian suggests your mplayer on lenny might be to old.

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Sid:~# mplayer /Person.of.Interest.2010.720p.x264-VODO.mkv
MPlayer SVN-r31309 (C) 2000-2010 MPlayer Team
Can't open joystick device /dev/input/js0: No such file or directory
Can't init input joystick
mplayer: could not connect to socket
mplayer: No such file or directory
Failed to open LIRC support. You will not be able to use your remote control.

Playing /Person.of.Interest.2010.720p.x264-VODO.mkv.
libavformat file format detected.
[matroska @ 0x9706be0]Estimating duration from bitrate, this may be inaccurate
[lavf] stream 0: video (h264), -vid 0
[lavf] stream 1: audio (aac), -aid 0, -alang eng
VIDEO:  [H264]  1248x704  0bpp  24.000 fps    0.0 kbps ( 0.0 kbyte/s)
==========================================================================
Opening video decoder: [ffmpeg] FFmpeg's libavcodec codec family
Selected video codec: [ffh264] vfm: ffmpeg (FFmpeg H.264)
==========================================================================
==========================================================================
Opening audio decoder: [faad] AAC (MPEG2/4 Advanced Audio Coding)
FAAD: compressed input bitrate missing, assuming 128kbit/s!
AUDIO: 48000 Hz, 2 ch, s16le, 128.0 kbit/8.33% (ratio: 16000->192000)
Selected audio codec: [faad] afm: faad (FAAD AAC (MPEG-2/MPEG-4 Audio))
==========================================================================
AO: [alsa] 48000Hz 2ch s16le (2 bytes per sample)
Starting playback...
Movie-Aspect is 1.77:1 - prescaling to correct movie aspect.
VO: [xv] 1248x704 => 1248x704 Planar YV12 
A:  26.5 V:  26.5 A-V:  0.019 ct: -0.043 637/637 25%  7%  1.9% 21 0 
A:4231.6 V:   0.0 A-V:4231.634 ct:  0.100 1569/1569 ??% ??% ??,?% 0 0 

Exiting... (End of file)
Sid:~# 

Cheers

[stevepusser]

A while ago (February) I did a build of mplayer-mt (32-bit only) for Lenny that may be able to handle the video. I forget if it required some updated libraries from Lenny-backports, you would have to enable that repository if it does, possibly for libschroedinger and liboil.

Mplayer-mt can use multiple cores for decoding some video codecs, most notably h.264 and mpeg2. It installs alongside mplayer without removing it, and the binary is "mplayer-mt'.

Link: https://sites.google.com/site/stevosfil ... 1_i386.deb

Of course, you should use great caution when installing some random deb off the net--but I think if you check out some other threads here, I'm fairly trustworthy.

[BondEar]

Playing ./Person.of.Interest.2010.720p.x264-VODO.
Seek failed

Person.of.Interest.2010.720p.x264-VODO. should almost certainly be Person.of.Interest.2010.720p.x264-VODO.mkv so try again, making sure you give mplayer the right argument (complete file name). Use tab completion in preference to typing it out.

OK I typed it out this time. All I got was this over and over:

Code: Select all

[h264 @ 0xb40fa0]AVC: nal size 6729281
[h264 @ 0xb40fa0]no frame!
Error while decoding frame!

I had to ^C to stop it.

I'd use the .deb provided above but I'm running 64-bit Debian so I don't know if that would be a problem or not. I could compile the most recent mplayer from source but last time I checked it was really complicated. If I'm going to compile it I'd prefer to compile it with VDPAU support since I have an nVidia card.

[stevepusser]

Yeah...the Debian build system for mplayer is really complex, looking at the rules file. I backported the mplayer-mt build from debian-multimedia, just removing all the "restricted" build-depends that are not available in straight Debian Lenny or Lenny-backports, and disabling those options in the configure section of the debian/rules file. Mplayer-mt has a much simpler rules file that I can actually follow.

I could try a build of the latest debian-multimedia upstream source...though a new mplayer-mt might need a newer vdpau than Lenny or lenny-backports offers. I'll let you know what happens.

[julian67]

Another thing I would do is check if you have a corrupted file. If the file was downloaded via http this is quite possible.

And building mplayer for Debian is only really complex if you don't read the readme You'll notice that mplayer downloaded from svn or snapshot contains a directory "debian" and a file "README.debian". I suspect they have been cunningly named to prick the interest of those users running Debian.

README.debian:

mplayer for Debian
----------------------

Most options are autodetected or configured during compilation thus
users are supposed to build this package themselves.

Recommended method is running "fakeroot debian/rules binary" in the top
directory

In case you would like to pass some parameters to ./configure, set variable
DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS like that:

eyck@ghost$ DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS="--enable-streaming" fakeroot debian/rules binary

This is also described in the online docs which can be reached by following the "installation section" link on the mplayer download page http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/features.html

Debian users can build a .deb package for themselves, it's very simple. Just exec

fakeroot debian/rules binary

in MPlayer's root directory. See Debian packaging for detailed instructions.

Rocket science or what?