Back to Encoding Hell - or - Why Some Videos Don’t Play Right
July 14th, 2007 by rfquerinFollowing on from the comment I left on the previous post, it seems we might be within the sweaty confines of encoding hell once again. heathenx is preoccupied for the next little while - something about a set of hair plugs and a week long brazilian wax 
- so it’s very likely I can’t fix the problem completely but I’ll summarize the situation. Abrogaticus left a comment describing the fact that while the intro to episode 018 played well, the main screencast was without sound. I’ve done a little testing from my end which leads me to the following observations:
Episode 018 (the downloaded avi file) plays entirely fine on my Ubuntu box at home using Totem. As does every other episode I’ve tried.
On my work box however it’s a different story. One which will undoubtedly get heathenx pulling those expensive hair plugs right out…
My own episodes play fine in WMP 11 and in VLC on windows - like that was any surprise [snicker].
Episode 002, the first one heathenx uploaded with the latest and greatest encoding scheme plays fine in WMP11 and VLC on windows.
Episode 016 and 018 avi files (the only two I’ve tried so far - both recently re-encoded by heathenx) play on both WMP11 and VLC with normal intro sequences, but the audio in the main screencast portion is double-speed. “Chipmunked” is the term we coined for it during the development of the site.
So I couldn’t replicate Abrogaticus’ problems with no sound - I just got chipmunked sound. Which is probably worse than no sound at all. We ran into this problem when we were doing our xvid encoding a month ago. It involves a mismatch in bitrates between the main portion and the intro. It’s fixable, however I don’t want to mess with heathenx’s videos (if I even have access to them), and I’m not sure I know where the problem is in the lastest and greatest encoding scripts. I haven’t been really involved in the development of them, and it may very well be that he mistyped a flag or two (he has sausage fingers which makes for clumsy typing - just ask him!).
So for the time being, here’s a few comments and suggestions:
- Download only my screencasts - just kidding. Give heathenx’s a try if you don’t mind and leave some feedback here on what your experiences are - what platform, what video player, and how it played back.
- You should be able to watch the streaming versions (they all seem to play correctly), and the latest flv conversion that heathenx has done on his streaming videos are very nice quality indeed.
- I’m going to try the same reencoding process and see if it works for me or not. I will not change my avi’s on the site until I know for sure. However I like the quality of the flv encoding that he’s doing, so I do intend to update the streaming versions of my screencasts over the next few days.
- Please give lots of feedback here on the blog. It may help us identify where or what the problem is. I know for a fact that heathenx tests his video playback on both linux and windows and with a couple of different players, so I’m quite surprised to get chipmunked audio here on my windows box at work.
Needless to say, he’s going to be pissed.
Cheers. RQ
July 14th, 2007 at 10:21 pm
Whoops. Now I feel bad. I hope I didn’t ruin Mr. Heathenx’s day.
Anyway, for what it’s worth here is what my testing has revealed.
When I play episodes 4,6,8,10,12,14,16,18,19,20,21,22,23 i can hear the intro audio but afterwards audio is gone. No mouse clicks, no dialog, no nose breathing.
I haven’t tried streaming. I downloaded all the videos and tried to watch them locally. Initially I tried watching with WMP 9 on XP. At first I couldn’t get any video and I heard chimpmunk after the intro. WMP reported a missing codec error. I downloaded FFDShow to resolve the missing codec problem (as suggested by WMP) and thereafter got video and intro sound for all vids and complete audio for the vids not listed above. I then tried upgrading to WMP 11 since Richard said it worked for him on that version. Same results. I tried uninstalling FFDShow after the WMP upgrade thinking that might have something to do with it. After uninstalling FFDShow, the videos reverted back to no video and chipmunk.
However, all the videos work beautifully in VLC (thanks for the suggestion Richard). That leads me to believe that the FFDShow decoder is having issues decoding the vids listed above. I’m not sure if it’s worth Heathenx’s trouble to try and figure out what is different in the encoding for the working and non-working since there are decoders out there that will handle all the vids properly (Richard’s WMP 11 codec and VLC). Richard do you know if you have FFDShow Decoder installed on your working windows box? Do you have a different decoder to handle the H264 codec.
And now for something completely different;
I love episode 09. I have a new wallpaper with my daughter popping out of a picture! Thanks for the tutorial!
-Abrogaticus
July 16th, 2007 at 4:17 pm
Glad you liked Ep009.
As far as WMP11 is concerned, I don’t have the FFDShow codecs installed (at least not that I know of). I just upgraded to WMP11 a couple of months back and have left it ever since. Funny that VLC plays the stuff no problem.
I’m kinda stuck because in order to make the nice streaming FLV files, I have to do the AVI conversion. So I think I’ll do all the conversions on my home linux box just so that I can use the nicer streaming files. I won’ t upload the avi’s to the site until we figure out the problem.
Why oh why is video such a nightmare? I guess the holy grail of quality and reduced filesize is so attractive that no one is settling on a single standard (except maybe flash), which is why we initially stayed away from the avi option. Maybe our initial logic was correct.
July 22nd, 2007 at 3:34 am
Hey…I’m back from my week long holiday in the Upper Peninsula, MI.
Well, firstly let me apologize to anyone who is having trouble viewing and listening to my screencasts. I was rather disappointed when I heard the news from Richard.
All of my episodes seem to play flawlessly on my ubuntu 7.04 laptop at the moment, as well as, my opensuse 10.2 box and my windows xp box with the k-lite codec pack installed. I have not experienced any problems so far which confuses me.
I was hoping to eliminate the need for people having to install “special” codecs or players to watch our screencasts. I may have to install a basic version of windows xp in vmware just to see what is required to play our new avi videos. My present versions of windows xp are fairly tweaked and I don’t remember exactly everything I have done to get my videos to play.
I would recommend to anyone the use of VLC if you are having problems with our videos, mine especially. It really is an excellent media player. Windows Media Player, on the other hand, is rather crippled and always has been. It’s pretty to look at, plays Microsoft’s media formats very well and integrates well within Microsoft’s OS, but that is about it.
I plan to do some testing tomorrow. Hopefully I can figure out what is going on. Until then VLC seems to be the work around.