BD Rip Support for ATV + Broadcom Card
#1
As per subject, wondering if a full BD (bluray) rip (considering network bandwidth etc...) would play on the ATV with the Broadcom card. (BCM970012).

Did searches etc and I couldn't find any info regarding it and I also looked in the Wiki.
The Wiki mentions support for 1080P but doesn't specifically say that the Blu-ray Rips will play.
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#2
it does.
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#3
No worries.

Any recommended format?

Playing a 30GB Ice Age 2 bluray rip (mkv) and it stutters pretty badly (although I cannot tell you the SVN I'm using unfortunately).

I'm playing a Cars 720P 4GB BD Rip and it plays perfectly so I know all that's working.

Thanks again.
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#4
Cars 720P 4GB BD Rip is a transcoded BD. BD is 1080p. full BD is 1080p in a m2ts container, nothing transcoded. m2ts, that's the BD container format.

If you are feeding mkv's, who know what's been done to it.

See the screenshot (http://xbmc.org/davilla/2009/12/29/broad...its-magic/) , that's right from a decrypted disk.
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#5
I've made the mkv with makemkv's default settings but I'll try the m2ts I've got and see how I go.


I will probably avoid makemkv in the future anyways, it looks like they are going to charge money's for it soon...
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#6
m2ts? How big are those files?

I can play 1080 mkv's and seems like those are the ones that get jittery after about an hour or playback, something I haven't seen in the 720's I've been playing. To tell you the truth, they pretty much look the same to me.
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#7
The mt2s (m2ts?)I have are about 9GB and there are three of them.

I'm testing out Planet Earth, more specifically, the Caves one.

I was testing over 100Mbit network and it was very slow (in terms of framerate), although it played.

I am now copying it over to the ATV directly and I'll try it from there.
If it works, then it's my network (and I suspect that it will probably work).

I'm using svn28256.

I also get random crashes with error code 10 but I think that is the Windows Home Server or some other undefined thing happening.
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#8
untg99 Wrote:The mt2s (m2ts?)I have are about 9GB and there are three of them.

I'm testing out Planet Earth, more specifically, the Caves one.

I was testing over 100Mbit network and it was very slow (in terms of framerate), although it played.

I am now copying it over to the ATV directly and I'll try it from there.
If it works, then it's my network (and I suspect that it will probably work).

I'm using svn28256.

I also get random crashes with error code 10 but I think that is the Windows Home Server or some other undefined thing happening.

**** sigh **** , and what have we said about "Planet Earth" and the Broadcom CrystalHD hardware decoder ?
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#9
davilla Wrote:**** sigh **** , and what have we said about "Planet Earth" and the Broadcom CrystalHD hardware decoder ?

No idea.

I just did a search on the forum using google search and the forum search and couldn't find anything about the playing (or not playing) Planet Earth.

So, no I have no idea what people say about playing Planet Earth from a Bluray rip but I'm guessing from your first post where you said
davilla Wrote:it does.
Referring to my question about Bluray rip support on the ATV with the Broadcom BCM970012 chip, that bluray rips (and therefore a bluray rip of Planet Earth) is supported.

I did see something about reference frames and the 'killa' Planet Earth h.264 though.

EDIT: Referenced here: http://forum.xbmc.org/showpost.php?p=478...tcount=426
From: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?p=479195
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#10
BD disks are encoded high profile at level 4.1 the stuff found on the Internet in MKV format will usually have H264 codec commands in excess of High profile to give similar quality at smaller file size. The exploitation of the codec features means that the decoder has a much harder job to process the files as each feature adds additional computations
The MKV encoded files will therefore result in non standard encodings that could make playback jittery on a device that is not a computer which has much more resources than an appliance like the appletv
I can confirm that bluray rips play fine on the ATV crystalHD but example files from posts here in the forum don't and no wonder why if you look at the h264 codec string of those files! The reality is that most of this material is created having in mind a PC user with 4+Gb Ram an accelerated graphic card and an audio card with separate audio jacks driving multiple speakers through RCA jacks (this explains why multichannel AAC is so popular in those files despite there is no home theatre device capable of decding it)
So I would be careful saying that the ATV does not play a bluray rip if I find a file on the net that has bdrip in the name
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#11
Thanks for that detailed information.

By Bluray rip, I'm talking about a direct m2ts stream from an actual Bluray that I have copied across onto the network.

From what I've read, the Broadcom will only support up to 10 reference frames, not the full 16 that the H.264 defines as the maximum and thus, there are 'some' things it cannot play in terms of a full Bluray rip (would that be right?).

I don't know if the Planet Earth full rip will not play because it's using too many reference frames or just a network/bandwidth issue but if so, is there a way to decode it to the same quality and just lose the extra reference frames, and/or find out exactly how many reference frames it's using?
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#12
Bluray disk maximum number of reference frames for 1920*1080 is 4 at level 4.1 for 30 fps and 5 for 23.976 fps
I do not know where you took the 10 from
This is has to do with the decoded picture buffer, if the buffer dries out you have a buffer under run which means dropped frames
Bluray is fully H264 HP level 4.1 compliant of course
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#13
Ok, I've copied the m2ts stream to my ATV HDD and it's working fine, streams perfectly.

So the Bluray direct rip is working into the AppleTV, my network is the cause.

I think I need a faster network/NAS, my cable run is something like this to my NAS:
ATV > Wall patched > Roof cavity - patched > rumpus > network switch > through the roof again > bedroom > patch out > switch > NAS.

So yeah, suffice to say, when I copied the file to the NAS, I got somewhere between 3 and 5 MB/sec.

I need something like,
ATV > Wall patched > roof cavity > patch out > switch > NAS.
or
ATV > USB HDD.

The run through the roof twice is killing it I think.
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#14
DLNA guidelines suggest playing content locally and not from NAS when possible and USB drives are cheap
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#15
That's cool, I have about 4 spare HDD docks.
I've seen somewhere that you can dock the HDD straight on the Apple TV without too much trouble, so I'll probably go that way when I get back from holidays in two weeks.
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