Screeching MKV with FLAC (Blu Ray)

I’ve ripped most of my Blu Rays with MakeMKV and replaced the Lossless Audio with FLAC streams made with EAC3TO.  I’m trying to stream them VIA Mezzmo and DLNA.  Every now and then the audio screeches making them almost unwatchable.  I thought maybe it was more than the Lives Fast Ethernet connection could tolerate but Bitrate viewer says one of the files maximum bitrate is 41009 kps and I’m not sure that’s enough to break a 100mbps connection.  I’ve tried connecting through Network share.  I think I’ve said enough for someone to inform me as to whats going on.

You would have said enough if you’d also played the file back locally.

Locally, as in…  it plays fine in VLC but I don’t have an external hard drive or a flsh drive large enough to hold the files so I can’t play them on the SMP directly.  I thought there was something obvious wrong that someone could point out so I could know how to fix it (since it affects most of my blu ray rips).  I’m thinking 100mbps isn’t enough but that would mean there’s 60mbps overhead…  if I got MegaBits confused with Megabytes it would barely play at all.  Other than that they’re encoded using FLAC 1.3.0.  I’ve got X264 running in the background but that can’t be the problem because if I set Mezzmo to transcode the file on the fly the SMP plays them back fine.  I’m pretty sure I’m doing something stupid, I just need to be told what.  I could try to find out if there’s a problem sending 5.1 pcm between the WDTV and receiver but it would be a waste of time if the answer’s common knwoledge, hence ask first.

Locally as in playing from USB HDD or stick. Successful playback in VLC don’t mean a thing when it comes to limited standalones. 100mbit is enough for playback over LAN. You can use MKVToolnix’s split function to create a 1 min (or long enough) sample file that should fit on your USB media and give it a try. If you upload it to sendspace.com we can give it a try too. Maybe the FLAC has too high bitrates, what does Mediainfo say?

I’ve spent an hour or so comparing the MediaInfo stats of the files that crackle.  I have to stop for now because I’m worried I’m annoying the neighbours.  So far it seems that it only happens on some 24 bit flac files when they make certain noises.  It’s happening on Fantastic Four which has low bitrate MPEG2 video so it’s not an overall file stat thing.  Van Helsing seems to crackle through the entire movie (possibly caused by background noise that I can’t hear).  I reripped the movie and played it back with the DTS-MA passthrough and it played flawlessly.  Would this be considered a bug or a techinical limitation?  Clueless has the highest over-all bitrate of everything I’ve checked so far AND 24 bit FLAC yet I never heard a peep from it (possibly a lack of background noise???)  I set the WDTV Live to send 2 channel PCM to my receiver and it still happened.  I’ll try cutting up a file tommorrow, Van Helsing seems particularly bad so I’ll start there.

(Sadly I learned The SMP won’t play 6.1 FLAC files at all… now I have to figure out what to do about Blade and Blade Trinity)

OK, so I cut up Van Helsing and put it a piece on a USB stick, plugged it into the WD and the issue was still there.  I then extracted the FLAC streams from both Van Helsing and Clueless and Van Helsing had almost four times the bit-rate.  So that’s the problem then.  My options would seem to be;

1: Convert all the 24 bit FLAC streams to 16 bit and lose an almost imperceptible amount of quality

2: Rerip the affected discs, keep the original HD Audio and have the DTS-MA tracks played with the DTS core if played on the PC or transcoded for DLNA

3: Re-rip the affected discs, keep the HD Audio AND add a FLAC track as well (Marking FLAC as default, and manually switching tracks when playing on the WD)

4: Find a more capable media player

Did I miss anything?

I’d go with 2 and wait for 4 caus I don’t hear a difference between DTS-MA and core.