[motorider]

Hello all. I have been using xbmc now for about 2 years. I originally setup with a server and a dedicated htpc. I currently have about 14TB of movies in ISO format. I want to set up my server to run plex. In order to do that I have to convert all of my ISO's to MKV. That part is no problem. My problem is that when I try to use xbmc on my htpc to stream an mkv movie, it will not play. it stutters frame by frame. To be fair I streamed the same movie from its original ISO with no problem. In fact I played the mkv with no problem on my server from both plex and xbmc. So for some reason the mkv file will not stream as well as the ISO. Any tips or advice would be great.

The reason to convert to MKV is 2 fold. One it allows me to use plex to stream movies to all of my roku devices, plus I can stream to my phone and ipad at home and away from home. The second reason is that I could free up a lot of space on my hard drives. My copy of Brave went from 42GB to a mere 21GB. This is including the DTS MA.

Thanks in advance for any help

My server has the following

i7 950 o.c. to 3.2ghz
6gb dominator ram
msi x2 big bang MB with dual realtek gigabit Ethernet ports
gigabyte radeon 5870
Kingston hyper x ssd 128gb
windows 8 pro

Seagate 4tb 5900rpm
Seagate 4tb 5900rpm
Seagate 3tb 5900rpm
Seagate 3tb 5900rpm
Samsung 2tb 5400rpm
Samsung 2tb 5400rpm
Seagate 1tb 7200rpm
Seagate 1tb 7200rpm

Thanks everyone

[motorider]

I just ran a network test and it passed with flying colors. 296mb up and 549mb down. so what am I missing? what is the difference between full quality mkv and iso? Both were ran from the same hard drive. I can seem to find any useful information in regards to my problem anywhere

thanks

[Prof Yaffle]

The answer is "it depends on how you're encoding them". MKV is just a container - it's what's in it that matters, and that's a function of the CODEC, compression, bit rate, frame rate, etc. - and then how those are interpreted at the client end. It could just be that you're encoding in a way that's stressing your clients - so the server will play the files fine, because it's a beefy i7, but the clients could be struggling without hardware acceleration (for example).

[jjd-uk]

In fact I played the mkv with no problem on my server from both plex and xbmc.

What exactly do you mean by this? Have you XBMC installed on the server and play the files ok from the local drive there?

[motorider]

Xbmc is installed on my server. I think that there is no compression. I use makemkv to convert from iso to mkv. I have only converted one movie to work with. I did not think there was any compression. If there is I didn't want any compression.

My Htpc is an and 3600 apu. 8gb ram. Kingston hyper X 128 ssd. Plenty beefy to play any encoded movie.

[PatK]

Both a proper deug log and the keyboard 'O' command should fess up any bottle necks, I have a sneaky suspicion this is going to come down to your gfx hardware acceleration. Try software rendering and see if that does anything for you.

[motorider]

Both a proper deug log and the keyboard 'O' command should fess up any bottle necks, I have a sneaky suspicion this is going to come down to your gfx hardware acceleration. Try software rendering and see if that does anything for you.

I thought that making an mkv from an iso using makemkv would net no compression. without compression I should not need to "render" or "encode" anything. i may be wrong. this makemkv is very generic and video options are slim and confusing to a newbie.

[PatK]

If there was no encoding at all, video as zeros' & ones would be crazy huge. The first videos had pretty non-standard encoding until MPEG-1 Part 2 videos came along, then H.262/MPEG-2 Part 2 was the common encoder for DVD's for a while then H.264/MPEG-4 AVC (History of Video Compression Standards) which is common to-day in Blu-Rays, these are the encoders not the containers. Of course low compression videos play out smooth and easy, while high compression encoding takes a bit of processing power to unravel and I guess the upcoming H265 4K videos are going to be a whole different matter.

The Container wraps audio, 3D, video and in some cases mulch-streams into one, this is what MakeMKV is doing not re-encoding, just taking the existing files and wrapping them in the new container.

In your case it's possible that the hardware decoder built into the gfx card is either not as comparable with or has problems with the encode used in the container. ONTH it could be another issue entirely... as note: keep and eye on the bottle necks and make sure you have current drivers. Have a peek at this articleit seems to suggest a similar issue and pointing at a different direction.

[Prof Yaffle]

The pause for me is " I streamed the same movie from its original ISO with no problem". Makemkv can't re-encode, it can only re-wrap, so the underlying streams should be identical - meaning that if the HTPC can play the ISO, it should theoretically play the mkv (leaving aside container overheads). I'd vote for the debug log (wiki) at this point.

[jjd-uk]

The mkv can be played locally on the server so it's definitely not an encode issue, plus iso's have a higher overhead than mkv so not likely the act of streaming over the network either, so at this moment I'd vote either audio settings or video hardware acceleration at fault however without a debug log it's all guesses.

[PatK]

The message I pointed to at the end, suggests DRM handling.

[jjd-uk]

I doubt that was anything to do with DRM, it's far more likely it was the Multichannel LPCM in MKV that was the problem there.

[Prof Yaffle]

Again, while we wait for the log, I wondered if it's an audio issue - perhaps the ISO includes a track that the client HTPC can play that the OP has stripped out while re-wrapping into mkv (for example). Something like that, anyway: it isn't a like-for-like if the ISO plays but the MKV doesn't yet they contain the same video stream.

[motorider]

I will try to get a log file up tomorrow. Thanks for the advice

[motorider]

Something I noticed is that my cpu runs at 60% while sitting idle in xbmc. Why would that be?