timeline issues on .MKV playback

[tomatodave]

Go easy on me as I am an extreme linux NOOB!!! but enjoying the journey.

I have installed SageTV 9 64bit using SageWisdom's script, (which worked great!! Thank you) on Ubuntu 16.04 64bit server running in a VMWARE ESXI 6.5 version 13 VM.

An HDHR digital OTA network tuner is setup and works great.....Playback is great also, with proper timeline, allowing pause, skip and FF. This tuner is recording to a NFS share on a FREENAS box.

I also have some .MKV videos on that same FREENAS box in another share. When I play these files, they playback just fine. The problem is the timeline is 0...meaning 0 length. This makes it impossible to pause, skip or FF. I tried a MP4 file with the same result.

I can playback ripped BD just fine....timeline is proper here.

Playback for all of this is the same results on HD 200 and HD 300 extenders or windows SageTV client.
I have also tried this on Ubuntu 64 bit server 14.04 with the same results.

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by tomatodave

Go easy on me as I am an extreme linux NOOB!!! but enjoying the journey.

I have installed SageTV 9 64bit using SageWisdom's script, (which worked great!! Thank you) on Ubuntu 16.04 64bit server running in a VMWARE ESXI 6.5 version 13 VM.

An HDHR digital OTA network tuner is setup and works great.....Playback is great also, with proper timeline, allowing pause, skip and FF. This tuner is recording to a NFS share on a FREENAS box.

I also have some .MKV videos on that same FREENAS box in another share. When I play these files, they playback just fine. The problem is the timeline is 0...meaning 0 length. This makes it impossible to pause, skip or FF. I tried a MP4 file with the same result.

I can playback ripped BD just fine....timeline is proper here.

Playback for all of this is the same results on HD 200 and HD 300 extenders or windows SageTV client.
I have also tried this on Ubuntu 64 bit server 14.04 with the same results.

Sadly when this happens, i think the only option is to remux the videos. In the past I'll just convert to mp4 using ffmpeg and then it works.

[tomatodave]

stuckless

Thank you very much for your valuable information.
I suspected that was the answer.

Thanks you again

[Tiki]

There have been a lot of posts over the past year about people seeing 0 length timelines for certain types of recordings withe the Linux version of Sage. I didn't pay real close attention since I don't use Linux and haven't had the problem. But I thought I remember in some cases the problem was a missing ffmpeg in the Sage directory. I think Sage uses ffmpeg on Linux (or sageplayer on Windows) to determine playback length for some file formats.

Anyway, you may want to do a Google search of the Sage forums for this issue. Just type your search term into Google, followed by a space and then site:forums.sagetv.com to restrict your search to just this forum.

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by Tiki

There have been a lot of posts over the past year about people seeing 0 length timelines for certain types of recordings withe the Linux version of Sage. I didn't pay real close attention since I don't use Linux and haven't had the problem. But I thought I remember in some cases the problem was a missing ffmpeg in the Sage directory. I think Sage uses ffmpeg on Linux (or sageplayer on Windows) to determine playback length for some file formats.

Anyway, you may want to do a Google search of the Sage forums for this issue. Just type your search term into Google, followed by a space and then site:forums.sagetv.com to restrict your search to just this forum.

I know I've seen this personally, and I know that I do have ffmpeg in my sagetv directory, because I actually use that ffmpeg when I remux mkv to mp4 to fix the issue. Because it's easier to fix the file, I actually haven't tried to figure out "why" the 0 timeline shows up. (maybe the next time, I'll take some time and see where it's getting the 0 from, and why).

[graywolf]

Happened once to me on Windows where sagetranscoder.exe was corrupt (0 bytes). A repair fixed it. If I recall, that was Windows ffmpeg

[tomatodave]

Originally Posted by Tiki

There have been a lot of posts over the past year about people seeing 0 length timelines for certain types of recordings withe the Linux version of Sage. I didn't pay real close attention since I don't use Linux and haven't had the problem. But I thought I remember in some cases the problem was a missing ffmpeg in the Sage directory. I think Sage uses ffmpeg on Linux (or sageplayer on Windows) to determine playback length for some file formats.

Anyway, you may want to do a Google search of the Sage forums for this issue. Just type your search term into Google, followed by a space and then site:forums.sagetv.com to restrict your search to just this forum.

Tiki Thanks for the information. That site specific search helped narrow in on a solution.....I found this and solved the problem.

Originally Posted by Narflex

For 1, try going to Setup->Detailed Setup->Advanced->Rescan Existing Library Files; I'd expect that to fix the MKV issues. If it doesn't, post a SageTV log file from when you did the rescan.

I did not realize that this scan was different that the scan import directories scan....I had seen it in that menu before and thought it was just another button to do the same thing...

Learned something today!!!
Thank you all for your help