Mplayer cannot seek MakeMKV bluray streams

[thecapsaicinkid]

Attempting to seek in mplayer results in it reporting "Stream is not seekable" and the program hangs.

[BitJam2]

I noticed this too. It is a limitation of mplayer. The VLC program can seek in streams. Also, XBMC has limited seeking. Specifically, it can resume at the point you last stopped in a stream. I wrote a Perl script to launch makemkvcon in streaming mode that puts each blu-ray disc on a different port to take full advantage of the resume feature in XBMC.

Since some clients could seek, I concluded that the problem was client-side, not server-side.

[thecapsaicinkid]

I couldn't say for sure obviously but what with MakeMKV being beta, I'd guess maybe there is something slightly broken with the stream (that VLC manages to cope with that mplayer doesn't)

I use mplayer for everything and would be much more inclined to purchase MakeMKV if it works with mplayer than just VLC.

[BitJam2]

Since both VLC and XBMC are able to do random seeking on MakeMKV streams, I think the problem with mplayer + MakeMKV is with the mplayer client. The limitation in XMBC is with the UI, not with the seeking. Also, the entire stream is implemented through a socket. ISTM that a client or server either implements seeking or it doesn't. Clearly MakeMKV implements seeking. It is incredibly unlikely that any sort of work-around would be required. What could the problem be? They misspelled the seek commands? It is even more unlikely that both VLC and XBMC both implemented a MakeMKV specific work-around.

You had also mentioned previously that mplayer crashes when you try to seek on a MakeMKV stream. This is clearly a problem with mplayer. The bluray support in mplayer is rather new and it has been buggy. I can easily believe it is not yet feature-complete.

Whether you buy MakeMKV or not is none of my business.

[thecapsaicinkid]

It may well be an issue with mplayer but definitely something I think the makemkv developers need to investigate also.

[BitJam2]

I've updated to the svn versions of mplayer, smplayer, and ffmeg (on Gentoo). Smplayer now seems to have limited seeking when using vdpau. The "skip forward +10 seconds" seems to work. I can't skip forward more than that and I can skip backward at all.

I can also now fast-forward in XMBC (but not rewind, it seems). Fast-forward x2 is also working in Smplayer..

[mike admin]

MakeMKV streaming server is just an ordinary web server that serves decrypted m2ts files. As long as player can seek and restart http streams it should work.

[BitJam2]

I've got the Cherokee web server installed. You can enable streaming with a couple of clicks. I did this and replicated the streaming/non-streaming results seen with the MakeMKV streaming server. MPlayer and SMPlayer don't seek while VLC does. QED.

You could probably install Cherokee and try this yourself.

[thecapsaicinkid]

Just received a response from the mplayer developers

0 - CONTENT-LENGTH: 15882326856
1 - CONTENT-TYPE: video/vnd.dlna.mpeg-tts
2 - DATE: Tue, 11 Jan 2011 20:13:12 GMT
3 - LAST-MODIFIED: Tue, 11 Jan 2011 20:09:22 GMT
4 - SERVER: MakeMKV v1.6.3 linux(x64-release), UPnP/1.0, Portable SDK for UPnP devices/1.6.6
5 - X-User-Agent: redsonic

The server is broken, it is is claiming it does not support
downloading arbitrary ranges (no Accept-Ranges header) and
thus seeking just is not possible.
Any program that can do seeking with this will be horribly
broken when trying to use it with a web-server that really
does not support ranges.
There is some tricks like just trying to send a ranges header
anyway and see if the server accepts it, but I somewhat feel
that asking for a webserver implementation to be at least
half-correct is not asking too much (though the custom YouTube
web-server does the same crap).

Can this be addressed?