WD TV Live H264 playback: video and audio become asynchronous

My WD TV Live (Firmware 1.05.04_V (and previous versions)) shows problems when playing H264 .avi files.

If played from the beginning without interruption, usually video and audio are and stay synchronous.

If interrupted (e.g… stopped after playing for a while and the same video resumed to the last position) there is a delay between video and audio; usually audio is recognizably delayed (up to a second) that won’t go away.

It happens with different files; it does not matter if the files are on a USB device or streamed.

Unfortunately there is no way to manually adjust the delay in WD TV Live (as offered by XBMC, and XBMC is also able to detect and eliminate the delays).

File info:

Video

Codec: H264- MPEG4- AVC(Part10)

720x567, 25FPS

Audio

MPEG Audio Layer 1/2/3 (MPEG)

Stereo, 48000, 192 kb/s

The files are recordings of TV movies retrieved from an internet TV program recording service (onlinetvrecorder.com) in HQ-Quality, using their retrieval and add-removing tools (no matter which type/version of tool used).

Any idea?

I note that other people have had problems with these files. One suggestion was to use mkvmerge to make them in mkv files. Its a quick and simple thing to do and you never know it may work.

http://www.bunkus.org/videotools/mkvtoolnix/downloads.html

Thanks for your hints!

Re-encoding is definitely a possible solution to my problem (tried it with HandBreak before).

But being forced to do so on a large amount of files is not an optoin to me.

(esp. because other video playing SW as XBMC and VLC are able to handle these types of asynchronicity of video/audio streams and synchronize when they appear or FF/FR actions are encountered).

So I will have to stick to my Mac-Mini and XBMC for playing these types of video.

cheers

    wuehl

My suggestion was to re-mux. You simply run your files through MKVmerge. As I said its very quick and simple. Takes about the same time as copying the file. Its not slow like Handbrake.

Hi richUK!

SUCCESS!

Took a while till I got the time to re-read your suggestion, have a look at the mkvtoolnix web site, find and install the required SW on my PPC G4 17" PowerBook 1.67GHz/2 GB RAM with OS X 10.5.8. Installation went smooth out of the box.

I tried it on a 873,7 MB .mpg.HQ.avi file automatically decoded and cut with QOTRDecoder (0.0.247/0.4.1132) that (untreated) showed a delay of several secs between sound and video. I used the default - settings of MkvMerge (v5.0.1 (‘Es ist Sommer’) built on Oct 23 2011 01:01:54). Muxing took 367 seconds. (source and target on local HD)

Well, not quite quick but with my dinosaur hardware acceptable.

Thanks a lot!

I think the same problem is with flv files; remuxing them to mkv helps (I use ffmpeg). The problem with flv is audio out of sync a few seconds. Would it be possible to fix this some day so the flv’s coud be played directly?

Here is ffprobe of one of the out of sync files:


xxx@xxxx$ ffprobe Närbild:\ Inslag:\ Patientsäkerhet-2011-11-27-19:55:00.flv
ffprobe version N-35991-gf1622a1, Copyright (c) 2007-2011 the FFmpeg developers
  built on Dec 20 2011 17:59:53 with gcc 4.6.1
  configuration: --enable-gpl --enable-libfaac --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libopencore-amrnb --enable-libopencore-amrwb --enable-libtheora --enable-libvorbis --enable-libx264 --enable-nonfree --enable-postproc --enable-version3 --enable-x11grab
  libavutil    51. 32. 0 / 51. 32. 0
  libavcodec   53. 46. 1 / 53. 46. 1
  libavformat  53. 27. 0 / 53. 27. 0
  libavdevice  53.  4. 0 / 53.  4. 0
  libavfilter   2. 53. 0 /  2. 53. 0
  libswscale    2.  1. 0 /  2.  1. 0
  libpostproc  51.  2. 0 / 51.  2. 0
Input #0, flv, from ‘Närbild: Inslag: Patientsäkerhet-2011-11-27-19:55:00.flv’:
  Metadata:
    moovPosition    : 28
    avcprofile      : 77
    avclevel        : 30
    aacaot          : 2
    videoframerate  : 25
    audiochannels   : 2
  Duration: 00:05:16.82, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 717 kb/s
    Stream #0:0: Video: h264 (Main), yuv420p, 640x360 [SAR 1:1 DAR 16:9], 25 tbr, 1k tbn, 50 tbc
    Stream #0:1: Audio: aac, 48000 Hz, stereo, s16