Playing MP4 containers with DirectShow, which codecs work?

[phelme]

This is currently my nemesis-> an MP4 container with H.264 video, AAC audio (basically what Sage compresses to with AppleTV Widescreen parameters)

I'm on a quest to avoid using SageTVPlayer and instead use DirectShow. Everything plays fine except for MP4's (yes, MKV's work fine). With MP4 containers I get the dreaded "PlaybackException: ERROR (-4,0x8007000d): There was a problem rendering the video portion of the content for playback." error.

What is it about the MP4 that's so stubborn? I find I can use ArcSoft codecs for everything: TS, MPEG2, MKV. I can play MP4 containers just fine through GraphEdit and it uses the right ArcSoft codecs, but Sage balks.

At this point for codecs I only have ArcSoft TME that came with the HD-PVR & and the old NVidia MPEG2 PureVideo installed. I ripped out CyberLink trying to get MP4's to work.

My setup:

Detailed Setup has MPEG4 set to DirectShow
always_use_dshow_player=true (MKV's play just fine using this)
mplayer/use_for_all_mpeg4_playback=false
videoframe/h264_video_decoder_filter=ArcSoft Video Decoder

Am I mistaken and that maybe I need an MPEG4 splitter like Haali installed? But why does it currently work fine under GraphEdit? ArcSoft does have it's own MPEG4 splitter, so is the problem that Sage is using it's own splitter for MP4's and can't currently use ArcSoft MPEG4 codecs? But why then do MKV MPEG4's work fine? One clue might be that the ArcSoft Matroska splitter is used when playing back MKV's through Sage by looking at the log. When playing MP4's it doesn't say which splitter is used, so I think it's using Sage's.

what I'd like to know is who has MP4 containers working, what codecs and splitters they are using, their merits and what there client properties are. A dump from their log while playing an MP4 would be handy!

[phelme]

OK, figured it out. Apparently the ArcSoft splitter isn't enough, even though it works with GraphEdit, it doesn't want to work with Sage. I installed Gabest Open Source MP4 Splitter (v1.0.0.3) and all is now happy.