Railfan Technology > Strange video behavior with some member videos

My two main desktop PCs are built around an Intel i7-4770K processor with the so-called Haswell graphics. My usual OS is Ubuntu 14.04 64-bit. One of these PC's is dual-boot with Win XP Pro SP3. There were two videos on the Eastern Railroads board today. The one on Blue Island Jct played correct. The one by EdK and his new truck did not play correctly. It did play correctly when run under Windows or on my laptop which has nVidia graphics (also Ubuntu 14.04 OS). It would appear that the video encoding used by TO is not consistent.

Any thoughts as to what may be happening?

John

I'm no computer whiz/geek ... but could it be somethin' to do with WinXP Pro that Microsoft abandoned a while back???

Odyssey
Evergreen, CO

Odyssey Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I'm no computer whiz/geek ... but could it be
> somethin' to do with WinXP Pro that Microsoft
> abandoned a while back???
>
> Odyssey
> Evergreen, CO

Keep in mind that Windows XP (Service Pack 3) machine played the video correctly.

Trainorders plays back the video differently depending on which browser is being used. If the OP's Windows XP machine is using Internet Explorer, then it's likely using Version 8 (IE 8), the newest version supported on the OS, and the video should playback using Adobe Flash. IE 8 does NOT support the HTML5/WebM video playback standard.

I'm pretty sure his Ubuntu Linux machine is NOT using IE 8, but probably Firefox. Even if he's using a different browser, the Linux machine should be using a browser much newer than IE 8, which does support HTML5/WebM video playback. I suspect the cause might be from how WebM standard is being handled on Linux machine.

I believe all TO videos are transcoded to MP4 (MPEG-4 Part 12) after uploading, which would mean H.264 for video encoding and AAC for audio encoding which is native on Mac OS X. WebM's default file format is MKV ("Matroska") and uses VP8 for video encoding and Vorbis for audio encoding. This might sound like gibberish to non-codec geeks, but the bottom line is, the native formats are different between what WinXP/IE 8 can play, and what Linux/WebM-capable browser expects to play.

MKV and WebM are capable of playing back MP4 files also, but I suspect how well this is done is dependent on how the software is implemented. It's hard to say where the root cause is at this point, but there are several possibilities. The OP can try different settings on how hardware video acceleration is handled on his Linux platform, for example, or try different codec packs, which I don't recommended yet. For starters, he can try to force his Linux machine to play Adobe Flash video instead of HTML5/WebM on his browser to see if that works.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/30/14 00:17 by cchan006.

I think cchan006 has a pretty good handle on things. As mentioned we encode videos in two formats, mp4 and webm. Our server will serve out either video depending upon which browser you are accessing Trainorders. Some browsers support mp4 (h.264), while others support webm (vp8). I am guessing that your browser being used under Linux may not have the proper libraries to support the video your browser is trying to play.

I will be honest, I don't support Linux as an end user OS. Sure it may work, but I don't have the resources to put behind ensuring compatibility that might be utilized by an extremely tiny fraction of our membership. If you are geek you can get Linux to do pretty much anything you need it to do. In this instance it might mean compiling and installing the required libraries. However, it is not user friendly and best reserved for those who can hack their way through problems that come up.

Todd Clark
Canyon Country, CA
Trainorders.com

I'm running linux on slackware64-14.1, and I have no trouble with Ed's video, either
as a downloaded mp4 or viewing it in Firefox as a web video. Just for fun, I tried
Konqueror (KDE's browser.) Konqueror would play the audio, but there's no video.
For a video editor I'm running kdenlive installed in /opt, along with all of the
required libraries (all are in /opt.) Konqueror does not play the web video even
with access to those specialized libraries.

Can you play Ed's video if you download it and play it on mplayer, or something like that?

There's always VLC which seems play anything.

John.

Thank you. When I use Konqueror, everything works correctly except for Dunsmuir and Sand Patch. All mp4 downloads work with vlc player. Firefox has the h264 plugin, but apparently there is strange interaction between Intel graphics and Firefox. On my laptop, which is also Ubuntu 14.04 but with nVidia graphics everything works fine.

John

Hello Todd,

Thank you for the assistance. Since all MP4 downloads work with VLC player and everything works with the Ubuntu 14.04 on my laptop (nVidia graphics) the problem with some videos appears to be an interaction with Firefox and the Intel graphics for Ubuntu 14.04 as everything except Sand Patch and Dunsmuir work under Ubuntu 14.04 with Konqueror as the browser.

My business has been working fully on Ubuntu since last January. My secretary has been on it for over two years. We have to go back to Win XP for QuickBooks and webinars that use Silverlight or Medialite. Current 14.04 LTS release of Ubuntu is quite stable and much more user friendly than earlier versions. Geek skills are only needed when you start adding software that is outside what most casual users would need.

John