Desparate to get Video working -i've tried for weeks

[GJ51]

Starting to Sound like SS uninstall/reinstall time.

Maybe Java too.

[manwithaplan]

Uggghhh, not looking forward to that. There's got to be someone here that runs SS on a Mac that can tell me how/if they have video working. ANYONE?????? I want to see how my install is any different than theirs.

Thanks for the help.

[manwithaplan]

By the way, I just loaded a brand new install of SS 4.4 on a Mac 10.5 VM image that is essentially untouched from the initial install, and the same problem exists when attempting to play ANY video. Music works fine, including FLAC and MP3's. So now we have Mac OSX 10.5 and 10.6, both 64-bit installs, not working for video with the recommended transcoding pattern (not to mention attempts to try several that others have recommended).

Anybody with a Mac running SS out there with video working fine??? FFMPEG is in the directory where it should be, not sure why this is happening.

Thanks all!

[imekinox]

Same problem here...

Still no solution found

[GJ51]

Any problems watching Youtube?

[GJ51]

I just found out that I can't get any videos to play in Firefox. I only use Chrome and IE 9 so i wasn't aware of the problem until one of my guests informed me he couldn't get any video working.

I use and recomend Chrome for SS. If you're having problems getting video to work, I;d recomend testing with Chrome to see if you may be encountering a browser issue.

Safari doesn't work unless you've figured out how to get flash to work with it.

[manwithaplan]

Gary, Firefox has never worked for me if I'm NOT transcoding. It cannot play my m4p's or m4v's natively, just hangs and hangs. But Safari works for both transcoded to flv and not transcoded, works fine now! I do need a better m4v to flv transcode string though, as my remote users are complaining of stuttering quite badly. Obviously, on the local lan here, i can just not transcode and the quality is perfect! But the remote web users with even decent office connectivity are complaining of the stuttering. Any thoughts on that? Here is what I am using...i am willing to sacrifice audio quality for better video quality. Whatever would help that, let me know...thanks!

my current string is...

ffmpeg -v 0 -ss %o -async 1 -i %s -f flv -b %bk -s %wx%h -acodec copy -

[/code]

[GJ51]

Here's a few ideas you can experiment with:

ffmpeg -v 0 -ss %o -async 30 -i %s -f flv -b %bk -r 23.976 -s %wx%h -acodec copy -

fmpeg -v 0 -ss %o -async 23.976023976 -i %s -f flv -b %bk -r 23.976023976 -s %wx%h -ar 44100 -ac 2 -

ffmpeg -v 0 -ss %o -async 25 -i %s -f flv -b %bk -r 25 -s %wx%h -ar 44100 -ac 2 -

ffmpeg -v 0 -ss %o -async 29.97002997 -i %s -f flv -b %bk -r 29.97002997 -s %wx%h -ar 44100 -ac 2 -

... for 24, 25 and 30 fps... "-async 1" is a special case where only the start of the audio stream is corrected (synchronized to video stream) without any later correction .


Usually video problems are mostly bandwidth related, Upside bandwidth is reall a big factor. No matter what the dnld at the remote users end, they can't get it any faster than the server can send it out. I get pretty good results, but I'm on 35/35 mbps Fios connection. I mostly preformat all my video into mp4 or flv to avoid the whole transcode issue. Transcoding takes a LOT of CPU overhead and the server can get really bogged down when multiple users start to hit the server at the same time. ffmpeg uses only one core per stream for the transcoding, so even if you've got a quad or 6-core, you can still easily max out that single core with a high res video.

I've found that if SS isn't transcoding, I can stream multiple videos at the same time with almost no CPU load.

I've got some 720p video on my public site that you can test to see if it works on your end. http://garyj51.subsonic.org use guest for U/P.

[Aethies]

By the way, I just loaded a brand new install of SS 4.4 on a Mac 10.5 VM image that is essentially untouched from the initial install, and the same problem exists when attempting to play ANY video. Music works fine, including FLAC and MP3's. So now we have Mac OSX 10.5 and 10.6, both 64-bit installs, not working for video with the recommended transcoding pattern (not to mention attempts to try several that others have recommended).

Anybody with a Mac running SS out there with video working fine??? FFMPEG is in the directory where it should be, not sure why this is happening.

Thanks all!

I am curious about this. Does the subsonic user have rights to write to the temp directory for transcoding? AND / OR are your permissions set right? I was having the same issue on video only. Access denied. I made a global change to Samba for default permissions when files were copied to the NAS. I also made sure that my directories were writeable by the subsonic service user.

[manwithaplan]

By the way, I just loaded a brand new install of SS 4.4 on a Mac 10.5 VM image that is essentially untouched from the initial install, and the same problem exists when attempting to play ANY video. Music works fine, including FLAC and MP3's. So now we have Mac OSX 10.5 and 10.6, both 64-bit installs, not working for video with the recommended transcoding pattern (not to mention attempts to try several that others have recommended).

Anybody with a Mac running SS out there with video working fine??? FFMPEG is in the directory where it should be, not sure why this is happening.

Thanks all!

I am curious about this. Does the subsonic user have rights to write to the temp directory for transcoding? AND / OR are your permissions set right? I was having the same issue on video only. Access denied. I made a global change to Samba for default permissions when files were copied to the NAS. I also made sure that my directories were writeable by the subsonic service user.

Aethies,

I don't use a NAS, at least right now, all files are local on the mac server OS. And yes, rights was checked and all is well there. In fact, if you read my subsuequent posts in this thread, video is now working for me, both transcoding and non-transcoded. My issue now is just that the m4v-to-flv strings I've tried, and I've tried alot, all result in heavy macroblocking for streaming from a remote location, even one with good connectivity. My home connectivity is excellent, and you can rest assured it's not network related on my home end, neither LAN or WAN. I am of the belief that there are more efficient codecs out there like libx264, but I can't seem to get them to work server-side. But that's where any further improvements will come from, the transcoding string itself.

Thanks for offering your help, I really do appreciate the effort to post a suggestion. Cheers to you.

-Brian