2 replies to this topic

[NickSharp]

Hi!  I'm going nuts trying to use the latest VLC (or ANYTHING) on Ubuntu 12.04 to play old Windows Media Center dvr-ms files recorded from digital ABC1 prior to about 26Nov2009.  For example, the Mediterranean Voyage series #4-12 are fine, but #1-3 have good video but no sound.

This is not new to either VLC or Ubuntu; it's been an annoyance for ages.

All attempts at converting say dvr-ms to mp4 or avi fail to produce a good result.

Does anybody know if ABC changed transmission formats during that week, and if so, what are the relevant details?

VLC 'show codec' suggests there IS an audio stream, but its packet statistics are all 0.

WMP11 on W7 plays the files OK, so the fall back is to borrow a windows machine, but that's not my preferred option.

Anyone?

[GoForMoe]

Not sure if it helps at all, but with a dvr-ms file from ABC1 Melbourne on the 25th November 2006 and one from the 27th of November 2010, VLC shows a 'Language: English' tag for the 2010 file, but not for the 2006 file. Unfortuantly I don't have anything from any point in 2009 still preserved in the original format, or have any idea if that would make the difference.

I'd suggest putting the dvr-ms files into VideoReDo on a Windows PC (might get lucky and have it work under Wine, the trial should do the job regardless) and getting it to convert it to MPEG (just a container change rather than a re-encode), it handles recorded TV files fairly well and fixes a lot of stream errors.

[Malich]

I vaguely remember something changing in about that timeframe, but I forget what. I have a vague recollection that they used to run both an AC3 and MP2 stream, but later dropped the AC3? They may have filled the AC3 stream with nulls for a while.

Does VLC show a MP2 stream in the files? It should be the primary stream, but $deity knows what re-arrangement WMC may have done when re-wrapping the transport stream into dvr-ms...