The PMS seems to serve up video files no problem so long as I see them in my renderer with the 'video/mp4' tag. I have many mp4 and m4v video files ripped from DVD via Handbrake, some of which are similarly tagged and others that are tagged 'MIMETYPE_AUTO'.
I can stream the 'video/mp4' files with no difficulty to both my iPad renderer and my Panasonic BD player, but the others require transcoding. This is where my confusion starts.
When I select one of the files requiring transcoding, the PMS log shows a StartPlaying event and the status bar on the UI tells me it is serving the file:
'Serving <name> [MEncoder][container: mp4][video: h264]'
The status panel shows the transcoding buffer filling with data, though the numbers sometimes make little sense going from positive numbers, e.g., 5 MB, to negative numbers, e.g., -4083 MB. The current bitrate never changes from 0 Mb/s though the peak bitrate goes to 33,554 Mb/s.
During all of this the mencoder process is working hard, so it appears as though the file is being transcoded.
However, this only lasts for a few seconds (maybe 30s or so, haven't timed it accurately) and no video actually makes it to my renderer. Eventually, I get a StopPlaying event and everything goes quiescent.
Eventually, I did figure out that if I browse to the '#--TRANSCODE--#' virtual folder and select the 'video/mp4' version of my file, it streams and plays with no issue. Curiously, the mencoder process does not appear to run and PMS coasts along using relatively little CPU.
I am confused because I had been under the impression that the transcoding was supposed to happen transparently when I selected the original file (it looks like that's what happens, but everything works furiously but nothing happens). Is the behaviour I am seeing normal? Should I be ripping with a different video codec? While functional, it's not terribly slick this way (hard to convince my wife that this is worthwhile
).