TSMuxer - SEI and VUI data ? insert SPS/PPS ?

[abolibibelot]

I sent my brother a DVD with two rather rare movies, one he's already seen and likes very much although it's frankly terrible (and which I tried to improve from the french dubbed DVD years ago – as it was a lost cause I ended up muxing the vastly improved audio {*} with a better looking 640x384 Xvid conversion of the NTSC DVD, and recently I found a much better quality 1280x720 x264 conversion from a BRD re-release, so again I remuxed the improved french audio with this and now it's definitely watchable, although the movie itself hasn't improved in the mean time *sigh*), and another which is the first installment of the series and which he had never seen (and which I found surprisingly decent compared with the "number II", definitely an apt moniker). On his LG BRD player he could watch the I but not the II. Turns out that the II is identified by MediaInfo as having a "variable" framerate, even though it should have a standard 23.976 FPS framerate. I've had similar issues in the past with that same player with videos identified as such, and the solution was to extract the streams, set the correct framerate with TSMuxer, then remux the streams (simply remuxing with mp4box / ffmpeg / mkvmerge was not enough).

Format                                   : Matroska
Version du format                        : Version 4
Taille du fichier                        : 2,24 Gio
Durée                                    : 1 h 48 min
Débit global moyen                       : 2 944 kb/s
Nom du film                              : Penitentiary II (1982)
Date d'encodage                          : UTC 2020-02-13 01:45:06
Application utilisée                     : mkvmerge v35.0.0 ('All The Love In The World') 64-bit
Bibliothèque utilisée                    : libebml v1.3.9 + libmatroska v1.5.2

Vidéo
ID                                       : 1
Format                                   : AVC
Format/Info                              : Advanced Video Codec
Profil du format                         : High@L4
Paramètres du format                     : CABAC / 8 Ref Frames
Paramètres du format, CABAC              : Oui
Paramètres du format, RefFrames          : 8 images
Identifiant du codec                     : V_MPEG4/ISO/AVC
Durée                                    : 1 h 48 min
Débit                                    : 2 560 kb/s
Largeur                                  : 1 280 pixels
Hauteur                                  : 720 pixels
Format à l'écran                         : 16/9
Type d'images/s                          : Variable
Images par seconde                       : 23,976 Im/s
Espace de couleurs                       : YUV
Sous-échantillonnage de la chrominance   : 4:2:0
Profondeur des couleurs                  : 8 bits
Type de balayage                         : Progressif
Bits/(Pixel*Image)                       : 0.116
Taille du flux                           : 1,95 Gio (87%)
Bibliothèque utilisée                    : x264 core 130 r2273 b3065e6
Paramètres d'encodage                    : cabac=1 / ref=8 / deblock=1:-2:-2 / analyse=0x3:0x133 / me=umh / subme=9 / psy=1 / psy_rd=1.00:0.25 / mixed_ref=0 / me_range=32 / chroma_me=1 / trellis=2 / 8x8dct=1 / cqm=0 / deadzone=6,6 / fast_pskip=0 / chroma_qp_offset=-4 / threads=12 / lookahead_threads=1 / sliced_threads=0 / nr=0 / decimate=1 / interlaced=0 / bluray_compat=0 / constrained_intra=0 / bframes=4 / b_pyramid=2 / b_adapt=2 / b_bias=0 / direct=3 / weightb=1 / open_gop=0 / weightp=2 / keyint=240 / keyint_min=24 / scenecut=40 / intra_refresh=0 / rc_lookahead=10 / rc=2pass / mbtree=1 / bitrate=2560 / ratetol=1.0 / qcomp=0.00 / qpmin=0 / qpmax=69 / qpstep=4 / cplxblur=20.0 / qblur=0.5 / vbv_maxrate=20000 / vbv_bufsize=25000 / nal_hrd=none / ip_ratio=1.10 / aq=1:1.00
Default                                  : Oui
Forced                                   : Non
Gamme de couleurs                        : Limited
Coordonnées de chromaticité              : BT.709
Caractéristiques du transfert            : BT.709
Coefficients de la matrice               : BT.709

So I'm going to try that. But there are two options I'm wondering about :
– a drop-down menu with “Do not change SEI and VUI data” / “Insert SEI and VUI data if absent” / “Always rebuild SEI and VUI data” ;
– a box with “Continually insert SPS/PPS”.
What do these mean ? What is the purpose of this kind of metadata ? For this particular purpose, should I enable one, both, or none ?



{*} It's hard to describe how lousy it was... The native audio from that DVD had about 45min at a very low volume, then about 10min at normal volume, then about 40min at a very low volume again until the end, plus at some point it had a horrible buzz, and at a later point it had about 10s of audio seemingly from another movie randomly inserted... The scary thing is that someone got paid for such an abysmal job.

[abolibibelot]

Anyone ?

[badyu17]

TSMuxer modifies the SPS header to add HRD stuff and also adds pic_timing SEI. I think this is something regarding blu-ray spec. You can recognize this when MediaInfo shows additional metadata like bitrate mode "variable" and maximum bitrate "40.0 Mb/s" for ts files created in TSMuxer. One of the options in x264 when you need to encode specifically for blu-ray is --nal-hrd vbr. That's the stuff TSmuxer is adding if it's not already present in the bitstream. I think if his player can play the movie, there's no reason to worry about these options in TSM. Regarding variable framerate I never had this issue, it shouldn't do this for 23.976 files. Did you mux elementary stream or mkv/mp4?

[abolibibelot]

TSMuxer modifies the SPS header to add HRD stuff and also adds pic_timing SEI.

So... what is the SPS header, and what is "HRD stuff" ?

I think if his player can play the movie, there's no reason to worry about these options in TSM. Regarding variable framerate I never had this issue, it shouldn't do this for 23.976 files. Did you mux elementary stream or mkv/mp4?

As I wrote, his player can't play that file, hence why I'm looking for a workaround. The difficulty is that he's 400km away, so I have to either send him another DVD (which I'll have to do anyway since there's the secondary issue that his old circa 2004 laptop computer doesn't recognize DVD+R discs – it won't read 720p x264 video smoothly either, but it can perform such lossless conversions), or try some conversion remotely via TeamViewer and have him test the converted file on the BRD player, then if it doesn't work, try something else in another TeamViewer session... So I'd prefer to get it right right away !
I remuxed an existing MKV file with an added AAC audio track (using MKVToolNix) ; the existing MKV file has the same characteristics with regards to the "variable framerate" reported by MediaInfo (I didn't create that other file). Is this simply a flag that MediaInfo identifies, or does it mean that the frames have actually variable display timecodes ?
Interestingly, when I load the file (either the source MKV or the remuxed one) into TSMuxer, the default value displayed in the "Change fps" field is "90000". If I load another MKV movie which is not identified as having a "variable framerate", the default value is "24000/1001", as it should be. Yet VLC Media Player identifies it correctly as 23.976216 FPS. SMPlayer identifies it as 23.975950 FPS.

There's another MKV movie I want to send him later, which has the same issue, and this one is identified as 24.251 FPS, although, likewise, VLC Media Player correctly identifies it as 23.976216 FPS.

Général
Nom complet                              : The Toughest Man in the World (1984) [DVDRip x264] {VF + VO + ST Fr}.mkv
Format                                   : Matroska
Version du format                        : Version 4
Taille du fichier                        : 2,02 Gio
Durée                                    : 1 h 34 min
Type de débit global                     : Variable
Débit global moyen                       : 3 062 kb/s
Date d'encodage                          : UTC 2019-08-27 05:30:06
Application utilisée                     : mkvmerge v35.0.0 ('All The Love In The World') 64-bit
Bibliothèque utilisée                    : libebml v1.3.9 + libmatroska v1.5.2

Vidéo
ID                                       : 1
Format                                   : AVC
Format/Info                              : Advanced Video Codec
Profil du format                         : High@L3.1
Paramètres du format                     : CABAC / 9 Ref Frames
Paramètres du format, CABAC              : Oui
Paramètres du format, RefFrames          : 9 images
Identifiant du codec                     : V_MPEG4/ISO/AVC
Durée                                    : 1 h 34 min
Débit                                    : 2 153 kb/s
Largeur                                  : 708 pixels
Hauteur                                  : 480 pixels
Format à l'écran                         : 4/3
Format à l'écran d'origine               : 4/3
Type d'images/s                          : Variable
Images par seconde                       : 24,251 Im/s
Espace de couleurs                       : YUV
Sous-échantillonnage de la chrominance   : 4:2:0
Profondeur des couleurs                  : 8 bits
Type de balayage                         : Progressif
Bits/(Pixel*Image)                       : 0.261
Taille du flux                           : 1,42 Gio (70%)
Bibliothèque utilisée                    : x264 core 120
Paramètres d'encodage                    : cabac=1 / ref=9 / deblock=1:-2:-2 / analyse=0x3:0x133 / me=umh / subme=9 / psy=1 / psy_rd=1.00:0.00 / mixed_ref=1 / me_range=24 / chroma_me=1 / trellis=2 / 8x8dct=1 / cqm=0 / deadzone=21,11 / fast_pskip=0 / chroma_qp_offset=-2 / threads=12 / sliced_threads=0 / nr=0 / decimate=1 / interlaced=0 / bluray_compat=0 / constrained_intra=0 / bframes=6 / b_pyramid=2 / b_adapt=2 / b_bias=0 / direct=3 / weightb=1 / open_gop=0 / weightp=2 / keyint=240 / keyint_min=24 / scenecut=40 / intra_refresh=0 / rc_lookahead=50 / rc=crf / mbtree=1 / crf=18.5 / qcomp=0.60 / qpmin=3 / qpmax=69 / qpstep=4 / ip_ratio=1.40 / aq=1:1.20
Langue                                   : Anglais
Default                                  : Oui
Forced                                   : Non
Gamme de couleurs                        : Limited
Coordonnées de chromaticité              : BT.601 NTSC
Caractéristiques du transfert            : BT.709
Coefficients de la matrice               : BT.601

In another thread someone mentioned mp4fpsmod, would it be relevant in this situation, or is TSMuxer the right tool for the job ?