Constantly buffering files, play fine in VLC

[davilla]

Does 3.8.1 release have the same issue with mono audio ?

[msyeed]

At least with these files, yes.

[davilla]

At least with these files, yes.

odd, seems to be fine with mono here. I can start up with mono, start up with 2.0 or 5.1, then switch to mono.

[msyeed]

Hm. I started the episode from the middle, and I couldn't replicate it. I started it from the top, it's there again, and now I can't reliably make it go away again.

At the top, there's an initial irregular video playback: slow-mo, freeze, fast forward, buffer, then normal playback.

If I started on 5.1, everything plays fine from this point. Switch to or start on mono, initial buffer, periodic buffers, sometimes 5-10 minutes apart.

It seems if I start in the middle of the episode the odds of the buffering go way down.

[davilla]

server and type ?

[msyeed]

Extremely low tech, sorry: Apple Time Capsule with an external portable drive sharing over SMB, ethernet to Apple TV direct to Time Capsule.

But I have far higher bitrate files that play just fine. My assumption is either adding the mono track and/or chapters with Subler did something unexpected or the mono track itself is messed up.

[davilla]

Extremely low tech, sorry: Apple Time Capsule with an external portable drive sharing over SMB, ethernet to Apple TV direct to Time Capsule.

But I have far higher bitrate files that play just fine. My assumption is either adding the mono track and/or chapters with Subler did something unexpected or the mono track itself is messed up.

Nah, it's the audio/video packet interleave. In normal (expected) files, audio/video/subtitle packets are nicely interleaved. In these itunes files, they tend to be in chunks at various large offsets. So the file reader has to constantly seek around to different offsets and this blows any ability to look ahead and cache.

I'm on AppleTV4K, using 802.11ac and my read bandwidth to qnap/syology NASs are around 500+ Mb/s. They are 1GB net connected to the wifi router. So very fast pipe to them.

A simple remux with nice a/v interleaving would be fast, I'm surprised Subler does not do this.

Still thinking on a better way to deal with these type of files...

[msyeed]

There's an Optimize option in Subler. I thought it was just for file size, but maybe it's for interleave too, I'll try some stuff.

[msyeed]

I updated Subler to current version just in case and saved out Optimized copies of everything. I was only able to test the first episode after doing this but it seems to work now flawlessly in both VLC and MrMC. Unless you hear from me again, it looks like this was the problem, thanks!

The only slight weirdness now is MrMC still identifies the mono track as stereo in the on-screen audio selection prompts.