a/v out of sync w/ mkvmerge

[runLoganrun]

i'm converting blu-ray iso's to mkv, using eac3togui and more, and/or tsmuxer and mkvmerge.
with either process i get sync issues with mkv's created. it seems to start out fine, the very beginning Dreamworks intro clip looks about right, but then 20mins into the movie it's way out of wack, the audio coming before the video, and it appears to get worse as the movie goes on, like up to a minute difference, or more. it's weird, even though it doesn't seem to be a straight delay problem, i tried to alter the timing in real time with VLC player, but it didn't affect it.

the movie is avc/true-hd and i've converted the audio stream to FLAC w/eac3to. i previously created an mkv w/ tsmuxer (downconverting to ac3) and then mkvmerge with same results, correct at beginning and then gradually getting more out of sync as the movie plays. i want to be able to keep using FLAC for audio, or better.

does anyone know how to fix this??

thx,
rlr

[poisondeathray]

Check the duration of the audio & video with mediainfo , if they match it's likely a constant delay issue, just fix the delay (play in a media player , use +/- to find the delay and apply with eac3to or mkvmerge)

Check your eac3to logs to see if there are gaps, if there is you have to run it thru the command line twice to fix the gaps

More info in this thread
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=125966

If you still can't figure it out, it might be your particular video, so post your log file in that thread and madshi will probably fix it and maybe ask for a sample

[runLoganrun]

Check the duration of the audio & video with mediainfo , if they match it's likely a constant delay issue, just fix the delay (play in a media player , use +/- to find the delay and apply with eac3to or mkvmerge)

Check your eac3to logs to see if there are gaps, if there is you have to run it thru the command line twice to fix the gaps

More info in this thread
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=125966

If you still can't figure it out, it might be your particular video, so post your log file in that thread and madshi will probably fix it and maybe ask for a sample

i don't think it's a constant delay issue as it's correct right at the start of the film, and then gets worse as time goes on. i checked the flac and h264 streams i have from eac3to with mediainfo again, it says the audio is 2:23, it does not give a length for the vid stream though, and unfortunately i deleted the file after not being able to sync it with vlc player to see if there was a constant delay. it did the same thing with a different movie and using ac-3 audio, starts off good, then gets worse as the movie goes on.

[runLoganrun]

OK, i've tried this every which way possible to make this happen and keep getting same results. it's def not an direct offset issue as it get's significantly, progressively worse the farther through the movie i am. i checked for time difference of each file created by eac3to, mediainfo does not display the length for video, just audio, that says 2:23. if i open the file up in vlc player, it reports 2:23:27 (mediainfo doesn't have seconds), so i doubt this is the issue, uneven stream lengths. i've ripped from optical and from hdd, i tried several different types of audio, flac, wav, ac3, and dts. dts and then wav were the best, it took them longer to go out of sync, which tells me that the audio conversion could have something to do with it. surely if that were the case though, everybody would have problems with it, and that does not seem to be so. now i'm at a complete loss, surely it's something i'm doing, or not doing, or the way something is configured that is the problem, but i have no idea what. I've been 'checking' make avc frames seekable in vid section, wasn't sure if i should be doing that, saw it in a tutorial and have left it on since.

thanks for any help,
rlr

[runLoganrun]

I may have found a solution for this, i demuxed my BD file w/ BD demuxer rather than tsmuxer, converted the audio, put it in an mkv with mkvmerge, and voila everything is synced up, must have something to do with tsmuxer, but that seems strange as so many ppl use it, maybe it's some weird conflict it has with another app. i've only done one so far, but hopefully i'll keep getting these results.

thx,
rlr

[runLoganrun]

ok, so not quite fixed yet.... tried a couple other movies and got the sync issues again. one, i checked to see if it was an offset problem- loaded it into vlc player and from middle of movie found the amount it was off, i remuxed with mkvmerge with the new audio delay set, it's weird it's out of sync for the first 30-40 minutes, by ~.5s to start, but after that it's fine until the end. i don't get how it can be off for a little while and then be right, shouldn't it be the same through the movie?

I'm trying to use the stretch function in mkvmerge, but i've redone the same 2 movies countless times now, tweaking it slightly with the stretch function, and it never comes out right. i read somewhere about taking the length of the audio and video and using the fraction you get from that, but it's hard to ascertain the exact length of each. mediainfo gives a length in time for audio, but not video, i loaded the movie into wmp and used the time from that, it was longer so it made sense, but then after the remuxing when i load the video the time has changed, so it matches neither. also, when i load a HD audio track into wmp, by itself, the time is hugely off, like it says 16hrs for the movie, even though it's playing right, the clock just moves faster, and when i load a avc file in by itself it comes up too short and the video is all messed up, so can't get a good read from that either, the only thing i can get a semi-accurate time from is flac or dts file, but i have nothing to compare it to. it's not making sense to me at all. is there some way to compute this exactly??

thx,
rlr

[imbibovita]

I feel your pain man. I have been having the SAME darn issue and I feel like I am the only one! Nice to know I'm not losing my mind.

My issue is exactly the same. I don't want to re-encode, I have 5.2TB of space so I don't care if they are huge and don't need to reduce the filesize. But .m2ts does not contain any header data or chapters so navigating the movies is a pain in the keester.

Have you found any solution to this??

[guns1inger]

I have just started playing with BD files and 720p mkv conversion, and found that I kept getting sync issues when playing back in VLC and The KM Player. Interestingly, MPC HC plays the files without any sync issues at all, including after jumping backwards and forwards along the timeline. As it stands, I currently have very little faith in VLC or The KM Player when it comes to .m2ts playback. I will reserve final judgement untli I can play these .m2ts files back on a hardware player (roll on Christmas), but for now I am not convinced that a sync problem actually exists.

[imbibovita]

These same files when played as m2ts or ts play without sync issues. I have used them on VLC, WinDVD, and Media Player Classic. I will, however, try it on my hardware player tomorrow just to make sure.

[imbibovita]

Yep, did the same thing on my hardware player so I know its not the computer. If anyone has any ideas I'd love to have somewhere to go from here...

[imbibovita]

Alright! Had some success. I decided I needed to try some other movies to see whether it was just the one I was working on (ratatouille). I used the same process on Cars and it was still out of sync on my computer. For the sake of thoroughness I switched to my hardware player... and it worked fine! So I figured it was my codec pack. I was using K-Lite Codec pack at the time. I uninstalled this and installed CCCP and Cars worked perfectly on my computer. Ratatouille still has issues, and I have not yet tested another movie, but I will do that later today and see how it goes. But at the very least if you are using anything other than CCCP I would recommend switching.

[guns1inger]

I would recommend avoiding all codec packs, period

[imbibovita]

Which would be great, accept that they are required to play .MKV files as far as I am aware of. Not to mention LPCM DTS, or FLAC audio files.

[guns1inger]

FFDShow is not a codec pack, and with that and the Haali splitter you can play mkv files. I never install codec packs, and can play anything on my PC. Again, all you need to play Flac files is the Flac codec.

Codec packs are far too risky. They install many codecs and make massive changes at once to your system. Many of these are often contradictory, and there is no way to tell what has gone wrong or how to fix it when things start playing up. They also never uninstall cleanly.

If you install codecs as required you know exactly what changes you made last, so if things start to play up you can easily troubleshoot and backtrack.

[runLoganrun]

I feel your pain man. I have been having the SAME darn issue and I feel like I am the only one! Nice to know I'm not losing my mind.

My issue is exactly the same. I don't want to re-encode, I have 5.2TB of space so I don't care if they are huge and don't need to reduce the filesize. But .m2ts does not contain any header data or chapters so navigating the movies is a pain in the keester.

Have you found any solution to this??

Hey- well, yes and no, but i did find a solution that does exactly what i want and is totally awesome. It does require vista media center though. if you have that then you need two things, Total Media Theatre by Arcsoft (vista media center does not play BD discs, but this program seamlessly integrates with it, and has the ability to play BD files from hard drive), then you need My Movies, a free (features cost extra) plug-in for media center that adds a Movies section to media center, and also includes a program that manages this interface, but also allows you to select a movie then search for it on their database for all the movie info and cover pics, which includes a synopsis and more information than you'd probably ever want, you can then add the info to the file which will be displayable in media center. they also have an automatic folder monitoring program, to add data, but i don't want anything like that running on my computer. files have to be in standard dvd or bd format, so this means larger files but also no converting. dvd's are easy to strip out trailer's, etc. from, i use clonedvd, i don't know of any such software for blu-ray, but i know they are working on a clonebd. i should be able to remove a lot of it manually and keep the main disc structure intact, i like being able to search for chapters through the menu. the end result is a menu in media center that is easily navigable with the remote, that has cover art and tons of movie info on it. this is the perfect solution for watching dvd/bd on the pc, htpc, imo.