theora - Feb 2010 - FFMPEG2THEORA 0.26 / BIG Theora testing / BUG in players or Lib

I tested the new FFMPEG2THEORA 0.26 and some players.

1. Biggest bug:

http://freefile.kristopherw.us/uploads/temp/push5tru.zi7

encodes into

http://freefile.kristopherw.us/uploads/temp/push5tru.ogv

the problem: it doesn't play well. MPLAYER reacts very badly, reports
"invalid frames" and HANGS (known issue ???). But in VLC there is also
a problem, less severe:

http://freefile.kristopherw.us/uploads/temp/bugyhand.png

(see shot, bad colours, +1 bug of VLC) - the hand moves to the right
but there is a "relict" in the middle. The original file has also a
"relict"
there but much smaller. FireFOX apparently plays this well.

So bug of VLC or LibTheora ?

2. VLC 1.0.5 bugs (I don't like this player, sorry)

* See 1. - maybe VLC bug
* Duration of OGG files still not fixed (WtF at 1.0.5 ...)
* Very bad sound from Vorbis codec (not from other codecs)
* The GUI is strange and buggy
* Crashes or "strange effects" in various circumstances
* Very poor video quality is certain circumstances ("noise grid")
* Steals seconds at movie begin and end
* Bad colours in screenshots
* probably more, no exhaustive search done

3. FFMPEG2THEORA issues:

* silently overwrites existing output file (not bug, but bad behavior)
* progress indicator strange and not very informative, reports "est
size -0.0 MP" (minor)

4. Firefox 3.6 issues:

* buffering problems
* controls depend from JS
* behavior not good if video bigger than screen
### the only one with correct duration handling (visible only if JS on) ???

5. Opera 1.50 Beta

Does it work for anyone ? For me still not ...

6. MPLAYER bugs:

* "offset" is ignored (well known)
* "nonstandard" subsamplings not supported, looks strange (well known)
* See 1. - behaves very badly, hangs, looses frames (?)

Anyone has "access" to MPLAYER developers or Bugzilla ?
Is this going to get fixed ?

> http://freefile.kristopherw.us/uploads/temp/push5tru.ogv
>
> the problem: it doesn't play well. MPLAYER reacts very badly, reports
> "invalid frames" and HANGS (known issue ???). But in VLC there is
also
> a problem, less severe:
Looks very much like it could have dup frames at the start. oggplayer
plays it fine (liboggplay based, as FF is). Lots of players barf on dup frames.
> * Very bad sound from Vorbis codec (not from other codecs)
When encoding ? Or playing a Vorbis stream which sounds good in another player ?
> 3. FFMPEG2THEORA issues:
>
> * silently overwrites existing output file (not bug, but bad behavior)
Was this file read only ?

[Firefox]
> * controls depend from JS
I think it's temporary. I recall hearing about this anyway. I really hope it
is.
> Anyone has "access" to MPLAYER developers or Bugzilla ?
mplayerhq.hu

On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 5:21 AM, dos386 <dos386 at gmail.com>
wrote:
> I tested the new FFMPEG2THEORA 0.26 and some players.
>
> 1. Biggest bug:
>
> http://freefile.kristopherw.us/uploads/temp/push5tru.zi7
>
> encodes into
>
> http://freefile.kristopherw.us/uploads/temp/push5tru.ogv
>
> the problem: it doesn't play well. MPLAYER reacts very badly, reports
> "invalid frames" and HANGS (known issue ???). But in VLC there is
also
> a problem, less severe:
It plays fine for me in mplayer, totem. ?VLC the has known issues
maintaining timing.
> http://freefile.kristopherw.us/uploads/temp/bugyhand.png
>
> (see shot, bad colours, +1 bug of VLC) - the hand moves to the right
No tool gives those crazy colors for me. Does VLC do that for other
files for you? It may be an issue specific to your display
configuration.
> but there is a "relict" in the middle. The original file has also
a "relict"
> there but much smaller. FireFOX apparently plays this well.
Thats not a 'bug'. ?The encoder has decided that correcting that
isn't
worth the bits. ?It's a poor decision made more likely because of the
poor decision by some earlier lossy encoder in the chain. ? The
development version of libtheora is much better at avoiding droppings.
> 2. VLC 1.0.5 bugs (I don't like this player, sorry)
>
> * See 1. - maybe VLC bug
> * Duration of OGG files still not fixed (WtF at 1.0.5 ...)
> * Very bad sound from Vorbis codec (not from other codecs)
I'd not heard of that. Can you provide more information?

Are you talking about *encode*. If you're talking about encode then
VLC may be using ffvorbis on your system.

The current development version of VLC fixed an issue where many
Theora videos would be blurry, but unfortunately it totally broke
offset handling. Hopefully this is fixed before the next release.
> 3. FFMPEG2THEORA issues:
>
> * silently overwrites existing output file (not bug, but bad behavior)
Thats how virtually all command line tools work. ?Suddenly
interactively prompting you for a command which is not normally
interactive is also bad behaviour.
> 6. MPLAYER bugs:
>
> * "offset" is ignored (well known)
> * "nonstandard" subsamplings not supported, looks strange (well
known)
> * See 1. - behaves very badly, hangs, looses frames (?)
A patch to fix 4:2:2 and 4:4:4 was recently accepted onto the mplayer
development tree.

2010/2/22 dos386 <dos386 at gmail.com>:
> http://freefile.kristopherw.us/uploads/temp/push5tru.ogv
Bug: Apache on this server reports the "Content-Type" of this file as
"text/plain", while the correct value is "video/ogg".

A quick fix for people that don't have root access to the Apache
configuration is to add in the same directory of the *.ogv file or a
parent directory a text file called .htaccess (the file name starts
with a dot) with the line:

AddType video/ogg .ogv

Pay attention not to overwrite any existing .htaccess file!

To test this, don't trust the information window in Firefox: it will
always reports the correct MIME type even if the server doesn't.

Use instead wget or "curl --head" from the command line or services
like <http://web-sniffer.net/> (I suggest changing the "Request
type"
from GET to HEAD, to save bandwidth).

Does Opera work when this is fixed? Additionally try loading the video
indirectly from an HTML page with code like this:

<video autoplay controls src="push5tru.ogv"></video>
> the problem: it doesn't play well. MPLAYER reacts very badly, reports
> "invalid frames" and HANGS (known issue ???).
My version of mplayer (the one from the Ubuntu package mplayer-nogui
2:1.0~rc2-0ubuntu19, that's pretty old and with lots of patches, but
none directly related to Ogg and Theora AFAICT) doesn't hang but it
shows 24 times messages like this one: "Invalid frame duration value
(18.876/0.000 => -18.876). Defaulting to 0.066 sec.". It's mostly
around 12.7, 17.3 and 18.9 seconds. No error messages at all before
12.6 seconds (frame 191 or something).

And my mplayer version does report wrong durations for Ogg videos:
1436.62 seconds for this file.
> But in VLC there is also
> a problem, less severe:
>
> http://freefile.kristopherw.us/uploads/temp/bugyhand.png
>
> (see shot, bad colours, +1 bug of VLC) - the hand moves to the right
> but there is a "relict" in the middle. The original file has also
a "relict"
> there but much smaller. FireFOX apparently plays this well.
The bad colors in VLC seems due to a RGB/BGR mixup or something. I see
*exactly* the same "hand relict" in mplayer and Firefox 3.6, maybe
it's more noticeable in VLC because it gets the colors completely
wrong?
> 3. FFMPEG2THEORA issues:
>
> * silently overwrites existing output file (not bug, but bad behavior)
Most command line programs do that by default.
> 4. Firefox 3.6 issues:
On the plus side Firefox now supports full screen playback of Theora
videos (right click -> fullscreen).

ciao

-- 
Lino Mastrodomenico

dos386 schrieb:
> I tested the new FFMPEG2THEORA 0.26 and some players.
> 
> 1. Biggest bug:
> 
> http://freefile.kristopherw.us/uploads/temp/push5tru.zi7
> 
> encodes into
> 
> http://freefile.kristopherw.us/uploads/temp/push5tru.ogv
> 
> the problem: it doesn't play well. MPLAYER reacts very badly, reports
> "invalid frames" and HANGS (known issue ???). But in VLC there is
also
> a problem, less severe:
> 
> http://freefile.kristopherw.us/uploads/temp/bugyhand.png
> 
> (see shot, bad colours, +1 bug of VLC) - the hand moves to the right
> but there is a "relict" in the middle. The original file has also
a "relict"
> there but much smaller. FireFOX apparently plays this well.
> 
> So bug of VLC or LibTheora ?
> 
> 2. VLC 1.0.5 bugs (I don't like this player, sorry)
> 
> * See 1. - maybe VLC bug
> * Duration of OGG files still not fixed (WtF at 1.0.5 ...)
> * Very bad sound from Vorbis codec (not from other codecs)
> * The GUI is strange and buggy
> * Crashes or "strange effects" in various circumstances
> * Very poor video quality is certain circumstances ("noise grid")
> * Steals seconds at movie begin and end
> * Bad colours in screenshots
> * probably more, no exhaustive search done
> 
> 3. FFMPEG2THEORA issues:
> 
> * silently overwrites existing output file (not bug, but bad behavior)
> * progress indicator strange and not very informative, reports "est
> size -0.0 MP" (minor)
> 
> 4. Firefox 3.6 issues:
> 
> * buffering problems
> * controls depend from JS
> * behavior not good if video bigger than screen
> ### the only one with correct duration handling (visible only if JS on) ???
> 
> 5. Opera 1.50 Beta
> 
> Does it work for anyone ? For me still not ...
> 
> 6. MPLAYER bugs:
> 
> * "offset" is ignored (well known)
> * "nonstandard" subsamplings not supported, looks strange (well
known)
> * See 1. - behaves very badly, hangs, looses frames (?)
> 
> Anyone has "access" to MPLAYER developers or Bugzilla ?
> Is this going to get fixed ?
This is a problem with the ogg parser. The people having worked on the 
mplayer ogg parser are Diego Biurrun and Reimar D?ffinger. You can look 
up their mail addresses on the mplayer devel mailing list or contact 
them via that mailing list.
http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/mplayer-dev-eng/

But be aware that work on mplayer demuxer has mostly stopped, as those 
of the ffmpeg framework are favoured nowadays.
Having scanned through the histories of the ogg decoder and parser files 
at 
http://git.ffmpeg.org/?p=ffmpeg;a=tree;f=libavformat;h=4e513e0594ede6afa1767454b7698d2b02f758c2;hb=HEAD
i would suggest to contact David Conrad.
Kontact address may be taken from 
http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/ffmpeg-devel/2010-February/082997.html
When contacting via ffmpeg-devel mailing list, please read 
http://www.ffmpeg.org/contact.html carefully and do avoid top posting 
and thread highjacking.

Yours
Stefan



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Well, new MPLAYER got released just today:
> MPlayer Sherpya-SVN-r30694-4.2.5 (C) 2000-2010 MPlayer Team
Good things:

+ Seems to support the "4:4:4" format ("ducks" video)

Bad things:

- Offset unfixed
- Hanging + "invalid" frames unfixed
- YUV4MPEG2 output is still "4:2:0" - subsampled both hor and ver
- Strange comments:
> Opening video filter: [scale]
> Movie-Aspect is 1.78:1 - prescaling to correct movie aspect.
> [swscaler @ 011866D4]BICUBIC scaler, from yuv444p to yuv420p using MMX2
> VO: [yuv4mpeg] 1280x720 => 1280x720 Planar YV12
> Selected video codec: [theora] vfm: theora (Theora (free, reworked VP3))