I have recently started to setup rasplex on a raspberry Pi2. That works quite nice. But I have one big issue. I have a lot of files which have been stored as a transport stream (.ts) from my satellite receiver. These files do not play smooth on rasplex/raspberry Pi2. There is a heavy stutter or judder in place, hard to explain what it looks like, but it is very bad.
Mostly I haven chosen the raspy because of the capability of proper frequency handling in respect to the material played back. That is OK for other files and produces a good play back quality. As well the transcoding is not enabled, everything is direct play.
The streams are h264 with 2 AC3 audio tracks inside.
I read a lot in the internet about this (also before with other hardware testing e.g. Fire TV). And often I heard that ts is kind of problematic or sometimes that mkv is “the format” of chose.
So I gave it a chance. I did change the container (I used mkvmerge for this) and stored the ts file to a mkv file. And - surprise, surprise - the mkv plays perfect.
So my question is why.
The only difference is, that info shows for
ts: 50 fps
mkv: 25 fps
The files have h264 1080i inside. So 25 frames seems to be more correct, since 1080i is interlaced and will be progressive with 25 frames.
As well there is a minor difference in the file size and I know that “timestamps” are stored in the ts file. Does this confuse the playback. Can these stamps just be ignored? To my knowledge these timestamps are used for synchronicity between video and audio, the playback of the ts file has indeed issues with the audio as well. Can that be a reason?
Is there a possibility to tweak rasplex to play ts better. Or do I have to remux all my stuff to mkv?
It was my understanding the TS is a container for MPEG2 Part 1 video streams. Why would you have H264 inside of TS container?
I would ensure I’m using MKV or MP4 as the container for h264 content as I’m sure the PI is choking on the non-standard container formatting. I recently had to remux a XviD using a faulty AVI container for the same reason.
TS stands for Transport Stream. Basically every digital television broadcast system delivers transport streams. That includes of course newer systems which use h.264. (DVB etc.) Pretty much every digital tv recorder software (apart from WMC) stores these TS streams almost unchanged.
just installed the 1.0.0 rasplex version and … the problems with the TS files are gone. Thanks! So re-containering is not needed … saves a lot of power.
I did only a quick test, but it seems that all the file are now playing ok.
I searched the forum how to do this. What is there gear icon on the right side? I see only a clickable “option” icon on the right, where Edit pops up. So help me please … again.
… saves a lot of power.