Problems with audio/video sync after seeking in large video files..

[Mojoski]

Is anyone else seeing an issue with the audio and video getting all out of sync if you're watching a large video file and you try to seek to some point further in the video than where you are at the moment?

I have been taking some of my Tivo Recordings and converting them for watching on the Torch. They always look and sounds great when you first start watching them, but if you try to use the progress bar to jump ahead a few minutes then suddenly the audio and video get all out of sync and eventually the audio will start pausing while the video plays, and then the video will pause while the audio catches up.

Seems like they have some serious work to do on the video player in how it handles data access for large video files. I've re-encoded some of my 1 hour videos in various formats and levels of quality and I continue to suffer this same issue.

Has anyone else seen it? Does anyone have a format and bit rate recommendation for what will keep your video looking good but put as little stress on the CPU and memory as possible? Has anyone else experimented with this?

Thanks for your input!

Mojoski

[Mojoski]

Nobody else has seen this issue? Come on, guys.. Jump in here!

[Knockz]

I have when I just took a regular xvid that I watched on my computer and copied it over. It can't handle those properly.

However I have been recoding using a program called IPodME and it has worked perfectly.

[Mojoski]

Thanks for the input, Knockz! I had tried that before but will give it another shot. What setting do you usually use? I'll report back here and let everyone know what settings seem to work best on my Torch.

My main goal is to find an encoding method that will allow me to fast forward through the commercials in my TV programs without having the audio and video get all out of sync. Do you use this for long TV shows, like an hour, and still have no issues when jumping around in the files? It works fine for short videos like 5 mins, but when I try with a large video I get all kinds of issues..

Thanks again for your input!

Originally Posted by Knockz

I have when I just took a regular xvid that I watched on my computer and copied it over. It can't handle those properly.

However I have been recoding using a program called IPodME and it has worked perfectly.

[homer1475]

I use Xillisoft video converter ultimate and use the blackberry profile. Never had any issues with audio and or video becoming out of sync. Audio once in a while gets a few seconds behind but it catches up quickly.

[Knockz]

Check out this article. It talks about the video encoding settings that work best with various devices. Its really helpful.

How to encode video for mobile use « Zencoder Blog

With iPodMe I just left the settings at default.

I've encoded videos as long as 2hrs and it was perfectly fine.

[Mojoski]

Thanks again for taking the time to respond with such helpful insights, Knockz. I appreciate your efforts.

I did some experimenting with iPodME this morning and thought I'd share my experiences in case anyone else was interested..

So one thing I should state clearly is that the videos I'm typically trying to convert for use on my Torch are recordings made on my Tivo. I use Tivo Desktop to pull these recordings onto my PC and then wanted to convert those to a Torch compatible format.

So anyway, I downloaded the latest version of iPodME and gave it a try. The issue I was having was that conversion of a Tivo recording was taking huge amounts of time. For example, a one hour show I was trying to convert was going to take well over 14 hours to convert. I remembered when seeing this that this was the reason I'd given up on iPodME when I first looked at it last week. This seemed very strange to me that it would take so long.

I looked in the console output of iPodME and saw that ffmpeg (the conversion tool that iPodME uses) was constantly pumping out errors that said something like "incomplete frame" "invalid frame size" and "frame CRC error" or something like that. I'm guessing this had something to do with the huge conversion times. This made me wonder if the Tivo file format was causing issues for ffmpeg for some reason. I tried running the .tivo files through Direct Show Frame Dump and tried that with iPodME and got the same errors and huge convert times..

At this point I figured that there must be something about these Tivo recordings that ffmpeg didn't like. That was when I remembered that the Tivo Desktop Plus program that I have actually supports conversion of shows into formats for various media devices. I decided I'd try that instead and it worked out quite well. I selected profile for a generic H.264 compatible device and a 3 hour movie ended up converting in less than an hour. The quality looks pretty good and the final file size was only around 750MB for the whole three hours of video.

The free version of Tivo Desktop also includes conversion to some protable formats, so I would encourage anyone here who wants to give the free version a try and see if any of the included conversion targets work well on the Torch.

Hope this info is helpful! In the mean time I'll hang onto iPodME for any non-Tivo records I want to convert!

Thanks again for your help!

Mojoski

Originally Posted by Knockz

Check out this article. It talks about the video encoding settings that work best with various devices. Its really helpful.

How to encode video for mobile use « Zencoder Blog

With iPodMe I just left the settings at default.

I've encoded videos as long as 2hrs and it was perfectly fine.

[Knockz]

Glad the info helped. At least article would give you the proper parameters for converting the videos if anything.

I never use to re encode the videos because it always took me long. On my new computer though it takes me less than 10mins per hour to convert with ipodme. But like you said, the Tivo format must be making ipodme choke.

[rjkolo]

What OS are you running?? I had this issues on the "out of the box" OS, but after updating to .246, and now to .377 I haven't had the issue any more.

[chigirl1216]

I have been using IPodifier and it works pretty well. I like the way it transcodes the TV-Show / Episode Name and the management system so you can specify how many of a particular show you want at a time

[cutedrdave]

I have been having the same problems when watching a video from the internet. for instance, if i pull up a news clip from MSNBC, say a 3 minute clip, by the time im half way thru it, the video is so out of sync with the audio, that the story makes no sense. this happens on videos from other sites as well. I havent tried watching a movie on my device.