Has anyone here been able to play the MP4 download files on OSX (or WD TV for that matter)?
When I try to play them in VLC, it crashes. In QuickTime, it says the file type is not supported (even though the QT help site says MP4 H264 are supported).
I can play the WMV's but would rather have the higher resolution.
I am on Snow Leopard (10.6.8).
Thanks
-- Edited by mark6139 on Sunday 23rd of October 2011 04:35:36 AM
We have no issues with VLC but we're pc based. We also play them in Media Player Classic without issue. Sometimes with the larger files VLC doesn't like to scan the scene. Macs are so dedicated to quicktime, it's not surprising that you would have an issue with MP4's but seems like they should play. Haven't heard this issue from other people but I think a very high percentage of the members are pc based.
You may want to try Media Player Classic if they have a mac version.
I wasn't able to get it to play in Windows either (VLC or WMP) but in the end it is really the WD TV (HD Media PLayer) problem I am more interested in solving (with WD TV I can easily play them on my HD TV).
I usually have no problems getting MP4's to play on the WD TV. More often I have problems with WMV's but in this case I can play the WMV's but not the MP4's. Is the resolution actually higher with the newer vids between the MP4's vs the WMV's?
Yeah, the new MP4's are higher res than the WMV's, they're 8 mbps, look much better than the wmv's. We can play them fine with VLC or Media Player Classic on pc. The longer scenes that go over 2 gigs in file size don't usually like to be forwarded/ scanned in VLC, but they play fine.
We did update the driver's for our video card, turning down video acceleration can also help.
I also tried to open them in MediaInfo and HandBrake and neither program can get any information about the format (i.e. they don't even recognize them as video files).
Although I doubt this is the problem, can you send me an md5 hash for one of the files and I can at least rule out that something is happening with the transmission?
I was able to find a PC on which I could play the MP4's on VLC (they were choppy but I attribute that to the machine and graphics card not being very fast). So I don't think it's a DL issue.
Again, what I'm really interested in is getting them to play on WDTV (if they look better than the WMV's). So I changed the title of this thread accordingly.
If anyone else out there has a WDTV HD media player I'd like to know your experiences.
I have no experience with WDTV, but I looked at the specs on their site. I will make a really wild guess, change the file extension from .mp4 to .mpeg4 and see if it then recognizes it as a video file, I say this because in the specs it lists the following-
(mpeg4 - h.264)
It's a bit of a wild guess but sometimes extensions can cause silly errors.
The WDTV player does not list the file at all if it has an '.mpeg4' extension so I can't even get it to attempt to play it.
At least since I can now see more of the file specs in VLC on Windows I'll see if I can compare the specs of the files from here with other MP4s that the WDTV does play and I'll post back here if something jumps out.
You must have a corrupt download or something. MediaInfo recognizes the MPEG-4 files fine. Here's the MediaInfo information for gracie-april-kissmegirl:
General Complete name : gracie-april-kissmegirl.mp4 Format : MPEG-4 Format profile : Base Media / Version 2 Codec ID : mp42 File size : 1.88 GiB Duration : 37mn 0s Overall bit rate mode : Variable Overall bit rate : 7 288 Kbps Encoded date : UTC 2011-10-04 01:31:48 Tagged date : UTC 2011-10-04 01:31:48
Video ID : 1 Format : AVC Format/Info : Advanced Video Codec Format profile : Main@L4.0 Format settings, CABAC : Yes Format settings, ReFrames : 4 frames Format settings, GOP : M=4, N=33 Codec ID : avc1 Codec ID/Info : Advanced Video Coding Duration : 37mn 0s Bit rate mode : Variable Bit rate : 7 127 Kbps Maximum bit rate : 8 000 Kbps Width : 1 280 pixels Height : 720 pixels Display aspect ratio : 16:9 Frame rate mode : Variable Frame rate : 29.970 fps Minimum frame rate : 29.970 fps Maximum frame rate : 30.000 fps Standard : NTSC Color space : YUV Chroma subsampling : 4:2:0 Bit depth : 8 bits Scan type : Progressive Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.258 Stream size : 1.84 GiB (98%) Language : English Encoded date : UTC 2011-10-04 01:31:48 Tagged date : UTC 2011-10-04 01:31:48 Material_Duration : 2220651 Material_StreamSize : 1978278866 Material_FrameCount : 66553
Audio ID : 2 Format : AAC Format/Info : Advanced Audio Codec Format profile : LC Codec ID : 40 Duration : 37mn 0s Bit rate mode : Variable Bit rate : 157 Kbps Maximum bit rate : 258 Kbps Channel(s) : 2 channels Channel positions : Front: L R Sampling rate : 48.0 KHz Compression mode : Lossy Stream size : 41.7 MiB (2%) Language : English Encoded date : UTC 2011-10-04 01:31:48 Tagged date : UTC 2011-10-04 01:31:48 Material_Duration : 2220693 Material_StreamSize : 43685203
Does Western Digital have forums for the WDTV Live? I recommend requesting assistance there and forwarding this MediaInfo information. Perhaps someone can point out the portion of how it has been encoded that makes it incompatible with the WDTV.
The MP4s play flawlessly on PC for me under this setup:
-Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
-16 GB RAM
-Core i7 2600K overclocked to 4.6 GHz
-2x Radeon HD 6970s in CrossFireX
-Latest AMD drivers (11.10 preview)
-All the garbage in Catalyst Control Center's "video settings" disabled, only enable automatic de-interlacing and pulldown detection. All the other stuff like "De-noise" and "edge enhancement" makes videos look like crap and AMD enables all that junk by default.
-Media Player Classic Home Cinema (32-bit) version 1.5.2.3251. Any recent SVN build should work fine.
Video skipping works flawlessly and instantaneously, MPC-HC plays the video with zero issues, etc.
So that's a setup you can use with MPC-HC and see if you can get a PC to play them back fine.
Now here is something you can try for your WDTV Live which might make the files more compatible. Download the latest version of MKVtoolnix. Open MKVMerge and drag over the .MP4 file. MAKE SURE in File -> Options in mkvmerge you check "Disable header removal compression for audio and video tracks by default."
Also check in "Extra Options" for both of the tracks under "Tracks, chapters and tags:" you make sure Compression: is set to none. Then start muxing.
When it's finished try playing back the .mkv file it created on your WDTV Live.
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Thanks for your suggestions. I was able to get the gracie-april file to load in MediaInfo, so I don't know what the problem was with the previous ones.
Yes, there are some WDTV forums, and one of the things thrown about there is converting with mkvmerge. I will look into that.