198 thoughts on “iPhone HTTP Streaming with FFMpeg and an Open Source Segmenter”

1. Vicky March 4, 2010 at 7:05 pm

   Hi All,
   Thanks for the wonderful job. It works very well.
   I met a lot of troubles when compiling the FFmpeg. Finnally, I resolved the problems by using a old version – ffmpeg-5.0. People who is struggling with FFmpeg can try it.

   I'm just wondering how to get the streaming log. Can anybody tell me?
2. Wei March 4, 2010 at 7:08 pm

   Hi,
   Ignore the last comment. I made a stupid mistake. Some place in the segmenter.c was changed occasionally.
   Sorry.
3. ram March 9, 2010 at 5:16 pm

   Can I create the mpeg2ts chunks directly without creating a .ts file and the using the segmenter to create chunks.

   Thanks,

   Ram.
4. Scott Kidder March 15, 2010 at 7:32 pm

   I've made some minor changes to the segmenter.c source file to allow audio-only segmenting. I've used it extensively with FFMPEG-encoded AAC audio files. Here are the patches:

   — segmenter.c 2009-07-29 17:33:15.000000000 -0700
   +++ segmenter.c.audio 2010-02-25 09:44:04.462813091 -0800
   @@ -280,13 +280,15 @@

   dump_format(oc, 0, output_prefix, 1);

   – codec = avcodec_find_decoder(video_st->codec->codec_id);
   – if (!codec) {
   + if (video_index >=0) {
   + codec = avcodec_find_decoder(video_st->codec->codec_id);
   + if (!codec) {
   fprintf(stderr, "Could not find video decoder, key frames will not be honored\n");
   – }
   + }

   – if (avcodec_open(video_st->codec, codec) codec, codec) codec);
   + if (video_index >= 0) {
   + avcodec_close(video_st->codec);
   + }

   for(i = 0; i nb_streams; i++) {
   av_freep(&oc->streams[i]->codec);
5. Mark March 27, 2010 at 3:17 pm

   Hey Scott,

   I can't get your patch to work. Is your modified segmenter available elsewhere?

   I need to encode AAC audio as well.

   Thanks!

   Mark
6. Scott Kidder March 29, 2010 at 2:30 pm

   Hi Mark,

   I've made the source and x86-64 compiled version available in a tarball here:
   http://urlgrey.net/drop/segmenter-withaudio-20100329.tar.gz

   Hope this helps,

   –Scott Kidder
7. skiria March 31, 2010 at 1:13 pm

   When I try to segment the .ts after encode with ffmpeg segmenter produce this:
   dts < PCR, TS is invalid

   How can I solve it? What's the problem?
   Thanks
8. carson Post authorMarch 31, 2010 at 7:49 pm

   For everyone having "dts < PRC, TS is invalid" issues it looks like it has been fixed in recent versions of FFMpeg. Check here for the discussion of the issue:

   http://archives.free.net.ph/thread/20090721.235201.0f49abe2.en.html#20090721.235201.0f49abe2
   http://archives.free.net.ph/message/20090721.152453.b727c066.en.html

   Here is the patch if anyone is interested:

   https://roundup.ffmpeg.org/issue1279

   Finally, I verified that the patch is in the ffmpeg-0.5.1 version. It looks like even more work has been done to mpegts in the current git version.
9. skiria April 1, 2010 at 2:13 pm

   I have the current ffmpeg version (ffmpeg 0.5.1) and it encodes ok. But "dts <- PCR, TS is invalid" appears when I try to segment the ts file encoded with ffmpeg. So, I supose that the problems is in segmenter not in ffmpeg.

   Thanks carson for your message but this solution doesn't works on my computer.

   Thanks in advance
10. carson Post authorApril 1, 2010 at 4:53 pm

    @skiria The segmenter uses the same libavformat code as FFMpeg so it wouldn't be any different between the two. I haven't seen the warning since upgrading so I would guess it is a problem with the input stream. From my experience the message is also just a warning and doesn't seem to cause any problems with the resulting encoding although I could imagine it might for long running video streams. FFMpeg is pretty nice but it can't convert everything. You may try converting the input into another format first and then using the segmenter.
11. thanatos April 4, 2010 at 12:49 pm

    The "dts <- PCR, TS is invalid" bug is still there in 0.5.1. I've tried with many different types of input files, but still getting it. The error is both outputed by ffmpeg and the open source segmenter. The Apple segmenter complains about finding "pes but no timecode".

    I'm also having problems that previous posts mention.

    The resulting files (from both open source segmenter and Apple segmenter) play on the iPhone, but after seeking in the movie, the video runs at wrong speed (it is fast forwarding) while the audio plays fine. Other times when seeking the video starts flickering and stutering so that lip sync is lost.

    I there any other tool than ffmpeg that can be used? Would an older revision of ffmpeg solve this?

12. Pingback: Life is Short » Apple’s HTTP Live Streaming: A Nightmare?

13. bgit April 13, 2010 at 6:17 am

    How can I test the segmented files on the computer? I generate a index file with the locations of the segments, like this:
    #EXTINF:10,
    video–1.ts
    #EXTINF:10,
    video-2.ts
    (I save the index file and the segments on the same folder)

    And I test whith a html file with video tag, with the source of video–> src="video-index.m3u8"

    But when I try to test a html file on safari anything is played. What can be wrong? Maybe on the locations? I also get PCR, Ts invalid but the .ts files can be played on vlc.

    Thanks in advance
14. skiria April 13, 2010 at 2:07 pm

    I stil have PCR, ts not valid error in 0.5.1 version. When I try to play the ts segments in vlc, audio is out and video jumps. I try to test on Safari and it doesn't play anything.

    Anybody have the solution? How can i solve this?
15. Max Lapshin April 18, 2010 at 2:23 pm

    At least I've tought http://erlyvideo.org/ to stream iphone http streaming: it autosegments mp4 files
16. Ryan Lu April 20, 2010 at 2:18 am

    For ffmpeg compile,
    ./configure –enable-gpl –enable-nonfree –enable-pthreads –enable-libfaac –enable-libfaad –enable-libmp3lame –enable-libx264 –extra-cflags=-I/opt/include/ –extra-ldflags=-L/opt/lib/
    Some may encounter the faac/faad/x264/lame error during configure, just download faad2.7 faac1.1.28 x264 and lame (all can be gotten from sourceforge.net) and configure it with –prefix=/opt, then configure it again.

    ————————–
    For segmenter compile,
    gcc -Wall -g segmenter.c -o segmenter -lavformat -lavcodec -lavutil -L../../ffmpeg/libavcodec/ -L../../ffmpeg/libavformat/ -L../../ffmpeg/libavutil/ -lbz2 -lm -lz -lfaac -lmp3lame -lx264 -lfaad -L/opt/lib -lpthread
    Where the ../../ffmpeg/ must be the lastest ffmpeg, otherwith you will suffer dts warning still.
    —————————————-
    For encoding
    ./ffmpeg -y -i 1mbps_70s.mp4 -f mpegts -acodec libmp3lame -ar 48000 -ab 128k -vcodec libx264 -s 380×480 -b 1000k -flags +loop -cmp +chroma -subq 5 -trellis 1 -refs 1 -coder 0 -me_range 16 -keyint_min 25 -sc_threshold 40 -i_qfactor 0.71 -bt 1500k -maxrate 1000k -bufsize 1000k -rc_eq 'blurCplx^(1-qComp)' -qcomp 0.6 -qmin 10 -qmax 51 -qdiff 4 -level 30 -g 30 -aspect 380:480 -async 2 1mbps_70s.ts

    Some may encounter pts<pcr warning, this is due to you're using outdated ffmpeg. Just check out the newest snapshot via git or svn (svn may suffer problem is you're inside NAT, so use git instead).
    ———————–
    For segment
    segmenter ../../1mbps_70s.ts 10 1mbps_70 1mbps_70.m3u8 http://x.x.x.x

    Now, you can play the segmented ts in VLC.
17. crazyfool2100 May 3, 2010 at 2:54 am

    I prefer to use HandBrakeCLI on Ubuntu 10.04 rather than ffmpeg. Ive had less errors and problems converting videos for the iphone with that software. Here is what I have used to successfully convert an flv file to a ts file segmented for streaming:

    # Convert FLV to MP4
    HandBrakeCLI -i input.flv -o output.mp4 -e x264 -q 0.589999973773956 -a 1 -E faac -B 64 -R 48 -6 dpl2 -f mp4 -b 96 -X 320 -x level=30:cabac=0:ref=2:mixed-refs:analyse=all:me=umh:no-fast-pskip=1:subq=5

    # Convert MP4 to MPEGTS
    ffmpeg -i output.mp4 -f mpegts -vcodec copy -acodec copy -vbsf h264_mp4toannexb output.ts

    # Segment output.ts
    segmenter output.ts 10 output output.m3u8 http://domain.com/video/

    Works great. Just make sure to compile the segmenter with the flag -lpthread if you get any pthread errors.
18. thanatos May 3, 2010 at 2:18 pm

    I've got better results now when using the latest ffmpeg from git as suggested in earlier posts.

    If I play one bitrate at a time it works flawlessly now.

    But if I use the same streams together to get adaptive streaming I still get the "fast forwarding" effect some times.

    I guess the TS support in ffmpeg is not 100% fixed yet.
19. madhu May 4, 2010 at 11:48 am

    Hi Carson,
    Thank you so much for the post.
    And I have few doubts can you please help me.
    I used your cmd as it is like below

    ffmpeg -i -f mpegts -acodec libmp3lame -ar 48000 -ab 64k -s 320×240 -vcodec libx264 -b 96k -flags +loop -cmp +chroma -partitions +parti4×4+partp8×8+partb8×8 -subq 5 -trellis 1 -refs 1 -coder 0 -me_range 16 -keyint_min 25 -sc_threshold 40 -i_qfactor 0.71 -bt 200k -maxrate 96k -bufsize 96k -rc_eq 'blurCplx^(1-qComp)' -qcomp 0.6 -qmin 10 -qmax 51 -qdiff 4 -level 30 -aspect 320:240 -g 30 -async 2

    It thrown "Incorrect frame size" error. Then I changed "-s 320×240" to "-s 480×320".
    After this it thrown "Invalid value '+parti4×4+partp8×8+partb8×8' for option 'partitions'". So I removed "-partitions +parti4×4+partp8×8+partb8×8" as well then it started converting.
    Do I have to do any thing else to get rid of these errors??

    And One more thing After converting my 3min 12sec video to 96k bit video I got 5.7MB file size, am I in the right track??

    Thanks,
    Madhu.
20. Pavan May 4, 2010 at 5:24 pm

    Sorry for the double post, my error message disappeared from the previous post because it had tags in it – so I've replaced the brackets with parentheses…
    Has anyone had this problem… no matter what I input into the segmenter, I get the following message:
    "Usage: live_segmenter (segment length) (output location) (filename prefix) (encoding profile)"
    I believe I've linked all headers and shared libraries correctly. I am using the most up to date versions of ffmpeg and codecs… But I can't figure out what I've done wrong. I'm on centos 5.4… maybe that could be a problem? If anyone has experienced this or has some ideas, please let me know.
21. Farish May 6, 2010 at 4:53 am

    Hi,

    I have accomplished the conversion to MPEG2 TS amd tjem segmentation using the open source segmenter u have mentioned. I am trying to use an Apache webserver but I dont have an iphone or Mac available.

    When I open the url (http://localhost/sample_segment.m3u8) using VLC media player or Gnome Mplayer, the segments play but there is noticeable delay when one segment is over and the next begins. I think this is because there is no buffering of next segments beforehand.

    Is there a solution which allows to play the segments without the glitches?
22. Farish May 13, 2010 at 12:36 pm

    I checked the log of Apache web server and found out that the HTTP GET requests arrived at about 10 or more seconds apart (I m running the server locally on the same computer which has the segmented video files). so the next fragments are not requested quickly enough by VLC.

    PS: i m using a segment duration of 10 secs.

    my next problem is that both ffmpeg and segmenter were running fine before but due to a problem, i had to reinstall ffmpeg (i installed the latest version) and now when i run the segmenter, it gives the error of dts < pts, TS is invalid.

    has someone been able to solve this problem? which version of ffmpeg doesnt give this error? i do get the segments but except for the first few segments, there is no sound in the others.
23. Ben May 13, 2010 at 3:27 pm

    The Apple HTTP streaming tools don't seem to be available on the developer website anymore. Does anyone know where to find them?

    The segmenter svn in this post is still there, but the Makefile doesn't work for me (even with the suggested revisions).
24. Mikko Myllyniemi May 18, 2010 at 7:32 am

    Hi,

    Carson:
    Thanks for the tutorial.

    Madhu:
    As mentioned earlier message replace '×' with basic 'x' with partitions and frame size (320×240). It seems that there has been used some special font with example command.
25. Gerard Aguilar May 18, 2010 at 10:54 pm

    http://tinyurl.com/28afpko
    Apple also mentions the audio only with still image option in section 10. Could you please let me know if you are aware of exactly how this can be done with ffmpeg using a HE-AAC file and a jpeg image. I assume some mpeg.ts stream is created with perhaps a single IFrame for video and an aac audio ES stream or a specially designed container format for the image, but can't seem to figure out how to create such a stream that would be compliant with the iPhone. My application is to embed coverart into an audio stream between every song. Any suggestions? Any help appreciated. Thanks
26. Haehchen May 23, 2010 at 5:52 am

    @Clint J
    @Peter S.
    @other windows

    If you complie the segmenter on windows you get this error:
    On Windows I'm seeing two m3u8 files, one called stream.m3u8 and one .stream.m3u8, and the .ts file cleanup doesn't take place when adding a windowing size.

    You must patch the return value on the write_index_file function. On windows the rename of the temporary m3u8 will fail. so replace it:
    
remove(index);
if (rename(tmp_index, index)) {
fprintf(stderr, "Could not rename %s to %s\n", tmp_index, index);
return -1;
}

    return 0;


    i am not a c freak but this helped me. by the way i compiled it with mingw32 and msys. i will do some tests and create a ready zip file with a static (i hope) binary.

    PS: you should use this segmenter.c (http://projects.vdr-developer.org/git/?p=istreamdev.git;a=tree;f=segmenter). they cleaned up some lines.
27. Haehchen May 26, 2010 at 7:14 am

    I have opened a SVN Project on Google there you can find my patched segmenter.c that also works on windows.

    http://code.google.com/p/httpsegmenter/

    Under the download tabs you can also get a binary exe for windows.

    some info how to compile that on windows: http://www.espend.de/artikel/iphone-ipad-ipod-http-streaming-segmenter-and-m3u8-windows.html
28. Loic Bertron May 28, 2010 at 4:25 pm

    First of All, Thanks a lot for your amazing work on HTTP Live Streaming for iPhone !
    But i have a little question for you. Actually, I'm encoding 3 different bitrates from a live RTMP Feed and sometimes Ffmpeg just crashed ! I already modify a little bit the process to loop and continue the show, but everytime i relauch the process, it's rewriting over the actual playlist, so clients can't continue the live you know. They have to relauch their players !
    I took a look to your code, but i'm not a developper and i can't understant how to bypass your function in Ruby who's rewriting the playlist.
    I have 2 idea :
    – When i launch the process, check if the main playlist exists. if it exist, just continue incrementing from the last index in that file. But i don't know how to do that using the Queue in Ruby.
    – When i launch the process, start from the beginning but append the new file in the playlist.
    Do you have an idea how to that ?

    Sorry for my poor English, i'm trying to improve it but it's still bad !
    Thank you again for your fantastic job with the iPhone. I hope you will be able to help mi with that.
29. Timbo June 24, 2010 at 2:45 pm

    I'm getting the "fast forward" effect on all my videos. Audio plays normally, but the video speed is roughly 2x faster than it should be.

    I've tried lowering the encoding bitrate/fps/etc but no joy. Tried reducing the segment lengths but that hasn't helped either.

    Using ffmpeg SVN revision 23684.
    Using assembla's segmenter SVN revision 50.

    Any tips are much appreciated!
30. James June 28, 2010 at 9:52 pm

    I'm still having not much joy with the segmenter. I followed (as I'm sure many others did) the guide here verbatim to install the latest x264, libvpx and ffmpeg:
    http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=786095

    resulting in:
    ffmpeg_4:SVN-r23876-1_amd64.deb
    x264_2:0.100.1659+git57b2e56-1_amd64.deb
    libvpx_201006290029-git-1_amd64.deb

    To compile the segmenter against the latest ffmpeg i did the following:
    gcc -Wall -g segmenter.c -o segmenter -lavformat -lavcodec -lavutil -L../ffmpeg/libavcodec/ -L../ffmpeg/libavformat/ -L../ffmpeg/libavutil/ -lbz2 -lm -lz -lfaac -lmp3lame -lx264 -lfaad -L/opt/lib -lpthread -lxvidcore -lvpx -lopencore-amrnb -lopencore-amrwb -logg -lvorbis -lvorbisenc -ltheora -ltheoraenc -ltheoradec

    I compiled a sample vid using a command I poached from this thread somewhere:
    ffmpeg -i trailer_1080p.ogg -f mpegts -acodec libmp3lame -ar 48000 -ab 1000k -s 320×240 -vcodec libx264 -b 96k -flags +loop -cmp +chroma -subq 5 -trellis 1 -refs 1 -coder 0 -me_range 16 -keyint_min 25 -sc_threshold 40 -i_qfactor 0.71 -bt 200k -maxrate 96k -bufsize 96k -rc_eq 'blurCplx^(1-qComp)' -qcomp 0.6 -qmin 10 -qmax 51 -qdiff 4 -level 30 -aspect 320:240 -g 30 -async 2 onewfile.ts

    I have tried running the original segmenter source, plus the audio enabled one mentioned on this thread and the one hosted on google code and they all have the same problem:

    ./segmenter ../encodes/onewfile.ts 10 onewfile onewfile.m3u8 http://somewebsite.com

    mpegts @ 0x253e170] max_analyze_duration reachedOutput #0, mpegts, to 'file':
    Stream #0.0: Video: libx264, yuv420p, 480×320, q=2-31, 90k tbn, 25 tbc
    Stream #0.1: Audio: libmp3lame, 48000 Hz, 2 channels, 64 kb/s
    [mpegts @ 0x2551490] muxrate 1 bps, pcr every 5 pkts, sdt every 200, pat/pmt every 40 pkts
    [mpegts @ 0x253e170] invalid dts/pts combination
    Last message repeated 812 times
    [NULL @ 0x2552910] missing picture in access unit

    The result is the output above, plus only two segments have been generated when I would have expected 4 (the video is 32 seconds long). Playing the vid in vlc results in sped up playback of the video, but the audio plays at correct speed.

    The encoded ts plus the segmented ts files (and playlist) are available here if anyone is interested:
    http://www.metacdn.org/sample.zip

    Any suggestions would be most appreciated.
31. Ofer Kalisky June 29, 2010 at 4:11 am

    Hi Carson,

    I am trying to create a TS with FFMPEG (from some other TS) that doesn't begin in timestamp 0.0 but rather takes the timestamp of the original TS. I tried the ffmpeg "copyts" option with no avail.
    You wrote: "One of those reasons is that it is said to not produce timestamps but there is actually a way to do that so you can offset the timestamps in the resulting stream so they match the offset". How did you manage to do that?

    Thanks, Ofer.
32. Natsu July 1, 2010 at 5:42 pm

    Has anybody tried viewing live streaming on a web-browser. It runs fine on the iPhone as well as on the Safari on my mac. But it doesn't play on Safari on a PC (or any other browsers on my mac). Is there a solution out there for this? And i'm using the HTML 5 element to display the stream on the browser. (actually it displays the text contents of the m3u8 file on the safari on a PC, which is really weird! :\ )
33. Natsu July 1, 2010 at 5:44 pm

    And could this have anything to do with the fact that I'm doing live streaming which is updating the m3u8 index file every now and then with the list of the newly created TS file segments?
34. André van Toly July 8, 2010 at 4:33 am

    Running in the same bugs as some of the latest posts with the segmenter. I believe it is related to one of the avcodec or avformat libraries included with the latest checkouts of ffmpeg. When I download the sample.zip from @James his post I can make valid segments with an older version of ffmpeg ("FFmpeg version SVN-r21627"). It results in 4 segments like you would expect.

    However, when I use a more recent checkout of ffmpeg ("FFmpeg version SVN-r23561") like on one of our servers it results in the same problems @James mentions: two segments, with the last segment being substantially larger then the others and audio out of sync.

    Maybe others can verify this? Point to a solution?
35. JLee July 9, 2010 at 3:34 pm

    Thanks for all the excellent help at this site!
    I've got the segmenter etc. working (on Mac OS 10.6 — it's really annoying that mediafilesegmenter seems to have disappeared!), and I can create a stream from a file. I'm doing VOD, and I want to be able to do seeking as fast and flexibly as possible — emulating what you can do with rtmp as far as I can. Viewing the result in Safari, using the video tag, I get very strange behaviour whereby after a while of scrolling around the player seems to lose track of where it is in the video. Hard to describe more clearly, maybe you can see it yourself at
    http://ddm.caad.ed.ac.uk/staff/jlee/streamqt.html
    I do not get this behaviour on the iPhone, but also this behaviour is NOT what I get in desktop Safari viewing the Apple bip/bop streams, e.g.
    http://devimages.apple.com/iphone/samples/bipbopgear1.htm
    (which all seem to seek under javascript control or scroll manually just as one would expect).

    I can't see anything different about what I have, but it seems it must be something about the encoding of the segments.
    I guess this is an issue of rather narrow interest, but I'd be grateful if anyone has any thoughts on it …
    Thanks! – John.
36. JLee July 9, 2010 at 4:03 pm

    Sorry – typo in that last post: bip/bop gear URL should be
    http://devimages.apple.com/iphone/samples/bipbopgear1.html
37. John July 11, 2010 at 11:31 pm

    @James – I've been running into the same problem as you. I'm a bit fuzzy on mpeg transport streams, unfortunately, but from what I can piece together, I suspect it's a bug in the generation of the original transport stream.
    If you look at the issue (171) that motivated the dts/pts warning, it has a reference to the TS standard stating that a stream should only have a DTS if it's different than the PTS. Looking at the ts I'm getting out of ffmpeg, I've always got DTS==PTS, which triggers that warning.

    In the short term, I hacked up libavformat not to blow away pts and dts when that happens, but that's clearly not the right fix.
38. John July 12, 2010 at 12:10 am

    Huh – this turns out to be useful:
    #define AVFMT_FLAG_IGNDTS 0x0008 ///< Ignore DTS on frames that contain both DTS & PTS
39. Liu Yue July 13, 2010 at 4:09 am

    Great job!
    i want to live streaming the video from my Logitech Quickcam usb camera.
    but your materials are from media files.
    i have install video4linux and i can see the video with vlc.
    can it work?

    thank you!
40. Rudy July 16, 2010 at 12:19 pm

    Hello,

    thank you for that good job!

    I still run into one problem, at the last ts file, the video stops, audio keeps playing. When I count the created files and multiply by the segemnt size in seconds, there is always less playingtime in total than the original file had. Anyone experiencing the same, anyone can give me a clue??

    Thanks for your help,
    Rudy
41. Jamie July 18, 2010 at 2:01 am

    I've been looking into making this work again, and I'm still having problems.
    I am using latest svn versions of ffmpeg and x264.

    Segmenter no longer complains about my transport stream, but the video run twice as fast as the audio ;(
    I've tried playing the transport stream directly generated by ffmpeg, and everything is in sync. So I suspect a problem somewhere in the segmenter.

    With the lastest libavformat and libx264, the segmenter code will no longer compile, so it may need some updating.
42. Dirk August 1, 2010 at 10:16 am

    There is a patch for the new vlc1.1.2:
    http://techblog.unwiredappeal.com/2010/03/vlc-http-live-streaming-module-patch.html
    So no segmenter needed anymore.
    vlc does the segmentation.
    I take a http stream from my dreambox, and transcode with vlc to a .ts file with segmentation (to watch tv over the internet)

    /usr/bin/vlc http://ip_dreambox:8001/1:0:1:6D66:437:1:C00000:0:0:0: –intf=rc –sout='#transcode{threads=2,width=340,height=240,fps=25,vcodec=h264,ab=24,
    vb=256,channels=1,samplerate=8000,venc=x264{aud,profile=baseline,level=30,
    keyint=30,bframes=0,ref=1,nocabac},channels=1,acodec=mp4a,ab=16}:
    duplicate{dst=std{access=livehttp{seglen=10,delsegs=true,numsegs=5,index=/srv/www/htdocs/stream/sample.m3u8,index-url=http://xxx.dyndns.org:8080/stream/sample-########.ts},mux=ts{use-key-frames},dst=/srv/www/htdocs/stream/sample-########.ts}}'
43. René August 2, 2010 at 3:25 pm

    Hi, first of all many thanks for the awesome work been done.

    But i have the same issues as Jamie.
    If i play the generated files generated by ffmpeg via vlc the file plays absolutely in sync. After segmenting i just get nearly half of the expected segments.

    What i see is that the tbr value changes between the two steps. So, if the output of ffmpeg is 25 tbr, after segmenting it is going to 50 tbr.

    Seems like a segmenter / libavformat issue. Is there already a solution for that ?

    I used the latest ffmpeg / x264 versions from last Saturday.

    Thanks for any help on that issue.
44. carson Post authorAugust 7, 2010 at 6:42 am

    @Dirk I took a look at the VLC module but it looks like it is fairly limited at this point. Hopefully it will continue to be worked on.
45. pulczynski August 10, 2010 at 9:40 am

    @Ren̩ Рsame here, you could use http://github.com/carsonmcdonald/HTTP-Live-Video-Stream-Segmenter-and-Distributor but after using their live_segmenter.c video is unseekable.

    I am working on solution for that (it seems that code is more or less the same and only differs in method of analyzing video).
46. pulczynski August 10, 2010 at 10:08 am

    @Ren̩ РOk, found something. live_segmenter.c works exactly the same (I was looking for some simple mistake in code). Difference is how ffmpeg analyzes stream vs disk file. If you do something live

    
cat test.ts | ./segmenter - 10 prefix /dev/null whatever


    you will get proper tbr but unseekable files.

    For me it's some kind of ffmpeg analyzes video – container information vs codec information.

    Was you video interlaced BEFORE converting to .ts?
47. pulczynski August 11, 2010 at 6:46 am

    @Ren̩ Рthis simple patch fixes your problem. It seems that your container is 25fps but h264 stream is not hinted properly (defaulting to 50fps).

    
Index: segmenter.c
===================================================================
--- segmenter.c (revision 7)
+++ segmenter.c (working copy)
@@ -295,6 +295,7 @@
case CODEC_TYPE_VIDEO:
video_index = i;
ic->streams[i]->discard = AVDISCARD_NONE;
+ ic->streams[i]->codec->time_base.den = ic->streams[i]->r_frame_rate.num;
video_st = add_output_stream(oc, ic->streams[i]);
break;
case CODEC_TYPE_AUDIO:

48. René August 20, 2010 at 12:32 pm

    @pulczynski – Thanks for your replies. Sorry for my late answer. Right now i am using 2 different versions of FFmpeg, one for encoding, the other for segmenting. But i will try your soulution. Will be much better if it works. Thank you very much.
49. XeM August 20, 2010 at 7:20 pm

    @Haehchen – I downloaded binary from location you mentioned above on Google. But, as I run segmenter on ts file I get following.
    [NULL @ 005bdbe0]missing picture in access unit. I've tried this on more than one files.
    Hope you can give some direction.
50. René August 21, 2010 at 10:38 am

    @pulczynski – I tried your patch. It works for me 100%. Thanks very much for your effort.