Handbrake converted videos out of audio sync on WD TV

[cinesimon]

Hi all, I wonder if someone recognizes this issue, and can either help me fix it, or just put me out of my misery and tell me I've wasted a lot of hours...

I have a bunch of old Eastern European DVDs, where the films are widescreen but with a 4:3 frame.
After ripping them to my HD, I have been using Handbrake to re-encode them to anamorphic widescreen, and it's also done a really great job of improving the image quality, something I wasn't expecting... I have also recently ripped a couple blu-ray discs, then reduced their size using Handbrake - and again, great job.

They all play absolutely perfectly on my computer, without any issue at all. Sync is perfect.

However, I have noticed just recently, to my dismay, that when I plug my hard drive into my gen1 WD TV media player, firstly the media player tells me the films are very small files - for example, a 4gb file on my computer, is suddenly 280mb.
Anyway the films start out fine but as time goes on, the video starts to lag quite badly. If I stop the film and then resume, it is back in sync again. But I'd have to do that approximately every 3-5 minutes for the dialogue to make sense...
This is the same for the 1080p and 720p bluray rips I reduced using Handbrake, as it is for 480p/576p files that I had ripped from DVD and re encoded to get anamorphic.
I thought that maybe this is just the media player's CPU not being able to handle the file it, so the larger stream within the mkv(the video streams are all AVC in mkv containers) lags. But maybe not, as I have no problems with complete, uncompressed, 40gb ripped Blu-rays playing on the media player.
So, maybe I need to change a parameter in Handbrake that I'm ot aware of?

Anyway I hope I have provided enough info for someone to be able to understand what is going on, and be able to offer some help - which would be amazing.

Thanks in advance, Simon

[jagabo]

Try using constant frame rate instead of variable frame rate. Make sure you aren't using features not supported by the WDTV -- not too many reference frames, not too many consecutive b frames, etc. I'm not sure what the WDTV's limits are but if you stick with ~4 reference frames and ~3 b-frames you should be ok.

[FulciLives]

I'm not sure if this is your problem Simon but there is an option in HandBrake to use a "Constant Framerate" or a "Variable Framerate" and for some stupid reason it seems to want to default to "Variable Framerate" but I've found that that can cause issues with sync, especially when demuxing the file.

So be sure to always use "Constant Framerate" to be safe.

One thing that I would try with one of these problem files is to either convert it to a M2TS file (using txMuxeR) and then see how it plays that way and/or make a new MKV (making sure you use the newest most up-to-date version of MKVmerge).

It might make a difference. If not try re-encoding one of the problem files (starting with the original source of course) and make sure you use that "Constant Framerate" option in HandBrake and then try to see if that makes a difference once you play it back.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman