Help: Family can't watch AVCHD home videos

[benjatelcom]

I am running sagetv 6.4, and PowerDVD8 ultra. I used to be able to play back my AVCHD clips when I had PowerDVD7.6, but after the upgrade I lost this ability.

Now it sticks with the "working" icon forever trying to open the file while in sage. The PDVD8 app plays them back flawlessly though. The Cyberlink MPEG2 and MPEG4 H.264 decoders still work perfectly.

I get this error when trying to play M2TS AVCHD files:

There was a playback error in playback. Details:
sage.playbackexception: error (-4,0x8004022f) there was a problem rendering the video portion of the content for playback.

The family can't watch our home videos now

Thanks in advance.

[SWKerr]

I suspect that Sage is looking for the old version of the codec and that it is gone after the upgrade.

Open the SageClient.properties file and search for "videoframe/h264_video_decoder_filter"

Do you find it and if so does it have a 7 in it?

[benjatelcom]

Good call, that was the first problem I bumped into after the upgrade.

That's been fixed already, sage will playback MPG and MP4 files. Without that change, Sage won't even list the PDVD8 decoders.

Any ideas how I can log the events invoked by playing M2TS files?

[benjatelcom]

I'm posting the conclusion I drew from troubleshooting with SageTV support, and how to fix it:

I did try playing back the files in graph edit, and it is unable to build a graph to playback the files, but if I build a graph manually using all of the PDVD8 directshow filters, it can render the file (but only to VMR9- yuck).

[hours of experimenting have elapsed]

Ok, so here is an update...

graphedit can only assemble a filter graph for M2TS AVC file playback when PowerDVD7 is installed on a machine, or if the PowerDVD7 navigation demux filter is registered. I installed PDVD7 on my vista laptop, which already had 8, and couldn't render the files. After installing, it could render them. And in graph edit, it was rendering them with the PDVD7 demux and the PDVD8 H.264 decoder just fine. I can manually replace the filter in graphedit and re-pin the PDVD8 demux in, and it plays fine too. But for some reason, directshow can't automatically connect the PDVD8 demux. I am examining their supported media types right now...

So, on my media server, I copied the PDVD7 demux AX file off of a PDVD7 installed machine to the server, and registered the filter. Bam, it is working in graphedit, and working in SageTV. So, this did fix the problem, by bypassing the troublesome filter.

Sounds like the problem exists in the PDVD8 demux supported media somehow... I don't fully understand how directshow filters advertise their capibilities to the directshow sub-system, but they seem to be identical:

Category CLSID:{083863F1-70DE-11D0-BD40-00A0C911CE86}
CLSID: {555C90CD-D094-4672-9B26-B73BDD38FEEE}
FriendlyName: [CyberLink Demux (PDVD7)]
Version: 2
Merit: 0x00602000
Pin count: 1
----- Pin 0 ------
Flags: Output:0 ZeroInst:0 Renderer:0 ManyInst:0
Instances: 0
Media Types: 2
Type: 0
MajorType: KSDATAFORMAT_TYPE_STREAM {E436EB83-524F-11CE-9F53-0020AF0BA770}
MinorType: KSDATAFORMAT_TYPE_MPEG2_TRANSPORT {E06D8023-DB46-11CF-B4D1-00805F6CBBEA}
Type: 1
MajorType: KSDATAFORMAT_TYPE_STREAM {E436EB83-524F-11CE-9F53-0020AF0BA770}
MinorType: KSDATAFORMAT_SUBTYPE_BDA_MPEG2_TRANSPORT {F4AEB342-0329-4FDD-A8FD-4AFF4926C978}

Category CLSID:{083863F1-70DE-11D0-BD40-00A0C911CE86}
CLSID: {33F6948B-CFBA-4020-99F5-7071E833FD87}
FriendlyName: [CyberLink Demux (PDVD8)]
Version: 2
Merit: 0x00200000
Pin count: 1
----- Pin 0 ------
Flags: Output:0 ZeroInst:0 Renderer:0 ManyInst:0
Instances: 0
Media Types: 2
Type: 0
MajorType: KSDATAFORMAT_TYPE_STREAM {E436EB83-524F-11CE-9F53-0020AF0BA770}
MinorType: KSDATAFORMAT_TYPE_MPEG2_TRANSPORT {E06D8023-DB46-11CF-B4D1-00805F6CBBEA}
Type: 1
MajorType: KSDATAFORMAT_TYPE_STREAM {E436EB83-524F-11CE-9F53-0020AF0BA770}
MinorType: KSDATAFORMAT_SUBTYPE_BDA_MPEG2_TRANSPORT {F4AEB342-0329-4FDD-A8FD-4AFF4926C978}


Perhaps you want to share this with the developers... I am going to try and take up this issue with Cyberlink, however I am using the OE bundled edition of their software that came with my BD drive and they probably won't offer much in the way of support.

Thank you for the excellent support resolving this issue, and happy holidays.

Benjamin