On 2 Nov 2010, at 00:11, Andy Bircumshaw wrote: >> ... get_iplayer uses ffmpeg to move flash video into an mp4 container so >> it's not impossible to change the ffmpeg commands to include cropping that >> resets the video dimensions to what the crippled QuickTime player can >> handle. The negative to this approach is that you perform a full re-encoding >> of the video file. Instead of a quick 2 minute swap of container formats it >> can take an hour or more to re-encode longer shows. I did some >> experimentation before and cropping is what you need. I can't remember the >> exact commands though - I ran out of patience and moved on to other ideas ... > > I'm not sure that cropping is required, as such. See also my other post, but > in the comments on one of the pages of Phil's site, Andy (ctrl-f "apple") > claims to have been able play other 1280×720 movies: > http://linuxcentre.net/bbc-iplayer-hd-1280x720-now-supported-by-get_iplayer > > He notes that iPlayer's HD recordings have 188Kbps audio and that Apple TV > will play up to 160Kbps. That transcoding is cheap in processor cycles.
I understand audio but video is a language i'm still learning. Several people have told cum half-explained to me that the issue with the BBC streams since the changes in April is that the video is now streamed in dimensions outside the hard-coded limits of the ATVs non-standard QuickTime player; hence using an alternative media player works. It's not an issue with video codec's or the audio side of things. At the time the streams changed I was told the solution is to use a player that understands how to bottom-crop the video to put things back to the right dimensions. I was pointed to reports of media player apps on desktop OS's handling the wrong dimensions by showing green lines at the bottom of the screen as evidence of a bottom-cropping problem. I still don't really understand it (or believe it) so I'm just regurgitating what others have said, but at the time I did run some experiments with ffmpeg to crop flashvhigh and flashhd content back to normal dimensions and it did result in video that displayed on the ATV "sort-of-okay" ..not smoothly or in great quality, but then I expect a range of other ffmpeg parameters need to be set to get a decent quality transcoding result. In the end other experimenting found nitoTV (which includes mplayer) which worked fairly well, and since then XMBC which for me is a great solution and hopefully a bit more future-proof. Christian _______________________________________________ get_iplayer mailing list get_iplayer@lists.infradead.org http://lists.infradead.org/mailman/listinfo/get_iplayer
