Downloads not playing

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scoopyx

Downloads not playing

Post by scoopyx »

Hi folks.
I've just joined up because I have a very strange issue and I don't know what to do about it.
I've come here because I use qBittorrent exclusively for my torrenting, so I thought I'd ask here.
The issue is this: For a long time, I have been able to download TV shows (primarily in MP4 but now many in MKV) which have played flawlessly on our TV or through the USB slot on our Blu-ray player.
But earlier this year, for some reason nearly all the shows I got just wouldn't play in either machine.
I thought I had tracked the problem down to being a matter of video fps (our equipment only likes 20 to 30 fps), so I'd convert them using HandBrake and away we'd go.
Now, I check every download to see what its framerate is, and even if it's within those limits (it's normally 23.976 fps) ... nope, no go.
I even re-encoded some of them in HandBrake so the fps was within those limits, but still no luck!
What I want to ask is, does anyone know whether uploaders/encoders have changed the way they do things or how they're encoding these things so that they become more problematic?
Or has there been an announcement somewhere that I haven't seen or something?
It's really frustrating, because I thought I'd fathomed it out, only to be caught again.
Anyway, advice or thoughts would be welcome.
Regards,

scoopyx.
scoopyx

Re: Downloads not playing

Post by scoopyx »

Hello again.
Just in case anyone was wondering (and in the hope of helping others), I have some information that may be useful.
I appear to have sorted this issue out.
It appears that our equipment does not like either the AC-3 audio codec (all the time) or the MKV container (some of the time).
If I run things through HandBrake with settings that I am certain will work on our equipment, everything seems to be happy.
I just make sure it's set to output to MP4, the audio codec is AAC and the FPS is within the limits of our equipment, and away we go.
I had been under the impression it was only the FPS issue, but apparently not.
I still don't know for certain what changed from before, but I'm not complaining.
My wife (and me, to a lesser degree) can now watch the shows we want to.
I hope this will help somebody else if they find that TV shows they downloaded before and which played perfectly, suddenly stop doing so.
It's a good lesson to check your codecs, I suppose!
Regards,

scoopyx.
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Peter
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Re: Downloads not playing

Post by Peter »

Ah, thanks for reporting back!

Both Avidemux2 and Handbrake are wonderful tools.
And yea this is a common issue. Even with Android, if you use MX Player, you have to download an "MX Player AIO codec pack" from XDA and use that, in order to be able to play most h264/hevc movies.
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