[RESOLVED] Trailers Stuttering

[michae1a1ee]

Hi.
This isn't a new issue but something I finally decided to post about.
I find that running the movie trailers in CMC are hit and miss. Sometimes picking a trailer (which runs in MPC-BE) runs fine, and other trailers will stutter to the point of not being watchable. Is this just a matter of some YouTube trailers being poor quality, using a strange CODEC, or something like that? I haven't found the pattern to what works and what doesn't, but I have tried on more than one decide. So far the issue seems consistent for the same trailer (movie trailer works on all my devices or does not work on all my devices, depends on the particular trailer I try to play).
Anyone else seeing this or know what is happening here?
Michael

PS - as a couple examples from testing relatively recent movies right now:
Working without stuttering: Dune 2
Stuttering like crazy: Avatar, The Way of Water

[Pauven]

I can confirm your experience.

Since CMC hands off playback to MPC-BE, this means the stuttering issues are between MPC-BE and YouTube.

My first thought was that perhaps these trailers are encoded differently, so I checked, and both the Dune 2 and Avatar 2 trailer codecs are the same, av01.0.08M.08(399) / opus (251). Of course, that is assuming I selected the right trailers. Both trailers played fine in Firefox where I tested.

My second thought is that MPC-BE might need updating. I've certainly experienced that MPC-BE seems to break for YouTube trailers every so often (black screen instead of playback), seems like YouTube updates something which breaks playback, and you have to grab the latest MPC-BE version to get a fix.

Side Note: I'm doing this testing on my office PC, where I installed MPC-BE from the Microsoft Store. Not only is it easier to install this way, but my hope was that it would be automatically updated, or at least easier updated. I installed it last year, v1.6.8.5, and I just confirmed it is NOT auto-updating, and in fact I couldn't find any way to force an update through the Microsoft Store. Very disappointing. Ultimately, I uninstalled it and re-installed from the MS Store, and it installed the latest 1.7.0.

Anyway, back to my testing. With my current version of MPC-BE, v1.6.8.5, and opened up the Avatar 2 trailer URL, and it was a stuttering mess. This confirms it is a MPC-BE issue, since I didn't even use CMC in this test, just MPC-BE. I noted that MPC reported that playback processing was being performed by my GPU, with is a top of the line RTX 4090, so it's not a hardware limitation. The stuttering was so bad, that after a couple seconds I hit Pause, and the stuttering continue for over a minute, frame by frame, about 1 frame ever other second, until it finally cleared the buffer and playback stopped.

I then repeated this test on the updated MPC-BE v1.7.0, and Avatar 2 played silky smooth! I checked the stats, and it was not dropping any frames.
So chances are, you just need to update your MPC-BE version.

I did notice that the resolution seemed poor, and the stats reported it was 1280x720@24. On Firefox it was playing 1920x1080@24. But that's when I remembered that this is confurable in MPC:

image.png (81.54 KiB) Viewed 300 times

By default, it's set to 720p using the old MP4 codec. So I changed this to the newer MP4-AV1 and 1080p, and it still played perfectly and now looks great!

image.png (86.65 KiB) Viewed 300 times

So the two take-aways here are: 1) Keep your MPC-BE version updated, and 2) Adjust the 'Playback > Online Media Services > YouTube' options for better quality.


BONUS TIP: MPC-BE Options > Player > Logo <--Change this to nothing by clicking the arrows next to "Internal". This way, when MPC launches you won't see their ugly full-screen logo, just a black screen, as the trailer loads. This makes it seem like MPC-BE playback is part of CMC, instead of some external program.

[michae1a1ee]

That's awesome! Thank you.

I've got a related Trailer mystery for you then that I've been able to reproduce on two PCs:
"The Firm" trailer from 1993.


It played with audio and stuttered video using MPC-BE 1.6 (which I too still had installed on my PCs). It plays PERFECT after updating to MPC-BE 1.7 when I feed that URL to MPC-BE directly.
However, from CMC, if I pick The Firm and choose Trailer, it plays without stuttering but also WITHOUT audio.

[Pauven]

CMC doesn't make any audio settings when it calls MPC-BE, it simply passes the URL and a couple options for full-screen and to close after playback finishes, so it seems like a longshot that CMC is adversely affecting playback.

I would recommend you start by verifying the trailer being played for The Firm is identical when played both ways. Perhaps you are using a different trailer when you do it directly. There are lots of duplicate trailers on YT, maybe the one in My Movies is a bad one. Just pause playback in MPC and check all the info/details to confirm the sources are identical.

The next step would be to verify the stats in MPC - you can turn on all kinds of debug info that overlays on the screen, shows bitrates and codes and all else, and that should include audio info too. Perhaps it is playing the same trailer two different ways, making a different audio selection in one case.

One last thought - make sure you're not playing a local trailer. I added support for local trailers last year, and if you have one assigned in MM then CMC will play the local trailer instead of the YouTube trailer. That opens up the possibility of something being wrong with your local trailer file, maybe the audio is corrupted. I have no idea if you have any local trailers, but thought I should mention this possibility just in case.

[michae1a1ee]

You're correct.

MyMovies (and therfore CMC) are using "watch?v=Auxb3l4Y8j0"


The file I linked previously was "watch?v=FX3AXA3icR0"


The trailer file MyMovies is using plays fine from the web browser, but no audio when played from MPC-BE!
Correct me if I'm wrong, but we don't get to pick the online trailer files that MyMovies uses for any given title. I don't see a setting with the URL listed in Collection Management.
For the record I don't have any local trailers stored currently.

[Pauven]

I would recommend reporting the audio issue on the MPC-BE support page: https://github.com/Aleksoid1978/MPC-BE/issues

EDIT: I tested the trailer, and I don't get audio in MPC-BE either.

In MMCM, the YouTube Trailer ID is on the Movie (beneath the Disc Title):

image.png (330.85 KiB) Viewed 285 times

[michae1a1ee]

Thanks!
I never usually expand the top level of the Movie Title like that in MyMovies, so that second page with the YouTube link is not something I'd noticed before. Very useful information. I've corrected that one movie with a different YouTube URL, and will notify MPC-BE as you suggested.
Great support, Paul!

[michae1a1ee]

FYI, the response to the error report on the MPC-BE support page:
Well, this is a “joke” of Youtube itself - http links to audio streams, there is silence in them.
There are also m3u8 links to audio - but we don't support them.

They don't really care that it doesn't play in MPC-BE; just chalk it up as a problem with YouTube. So my new system will be, when I find a misbehaving YouTube trailer in my Collection, I'll just locate a new video and change the YouTube trailer field in Collection Management. Thanks for pointing that field out! I noticed it doesn't seem to trickle down to CMC immediately, even sometimes after a full run of the CCC metadata updater. I think the trick I found was to update a few other fields as well as the same time so that the Movie Title indeed gets picked up by CCC.

[Pauven]

CCC is dependent upon the My Movies API to detect and report the change. Unfortunately, there are bugs in My Movies and it doesn't detect changes in some fields.

Your solution to change another field works. Also, another (easier) option is to do a forced export in CCC. To do this, type the title name (or at least enough of it, i.e. "The Firm" or even just "Firm" into the filter text box in CCC, then run a Full Export. This triggers a special feature, CCC will do a full export of any matching titles, but unlike a regular Full Export that rebuilds the entire CCC DB, it runs in an append mode, so the exported titles are appended to or updated in the existing CCC DB.

Thinking about how The Firm trailer might have been bad, it is a relatively old film, so perhaps it's an old trailer upload and it was authored incorrectly by some old software. I'd imagine this would be a rare situation, I've certainly never stumbled across it before, and I've played a lot of trailers with MPC-BE.

[michae1a1ee]

Great feature!
Yeah - I don't think MyMovies properly picks up on a field change done to just that YouTube field; didn't seem to be working for me.
Your update method in CCC is way easier than trying to edit a bunch of extra fields and hoping that MyMovies triggers an update request. I'm going to try the CCC method the next time I do a manual edit of a specific Movie Title. I hadn't noticed that option before because I almost always have CCC running in Auto mode, kicking in the export attempt every 5 minutes.