Nikon J1 Videos Don't Play on ATV3

[Aragornii]

I import my camera videos into iPhoto and stream them to my ATV3. 1080P videos from my Canon EOS7D and iphone stream perfectly, but videos taken on my Nikon don't. The thumbnails are blank and when I click on them it's just a green screen (but I do get audio).

Any guess as to why this may be? They just appear to be regular .h264 videos like those produced by my Canon.

 

[simsaladimbamba]

In order to find out, what may be wrong with your video, you can use the following three applications to analyse a sample video file.

• VideoSpec (free)
• MediaInfo (free)
• Media Inspector (2.99 USD € in the Mac App Store (MAS))

When done, you can use the "Report" (VideoSpec) and "Export" (Media Inspector) button to export a report,
attachable to your next post via the

button.
In MediaInfo you have to go to the Menu Bar, select View > Text and copy the text via CMD+A > CMD+C and paste it via CMD+V into your next post.​

 

[Aragornii]

the version of mediainfo I had did not have an export button, but here is a print screen.

Edit: after looking at that my guess is that it's the 59.94 fps that is the problem.

 

[Aragornii]

Any ideas on which is the likely culprit? The fps certainly but anything else that would cause the video to be unviewable?

How best to fixt that, is using something like handbrake the only option? is the difference between 60fps and 30fps enough that I'd notice a quality difference in the videos (when viewed on a source that could hand both)?

 

[Cave Man]

They just appear to be regular .h264 videos like those produced by my Canon.

What is the container?

 

[Aragornii]

What is the container?

.MOV, if I understand your question correctly.

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

Any ideas on which is the likely culprit? The fps certainly but anything else that would cause the video to be unviewable?

The FPS is the culprit. TV can only play 30fps (actually 29.97). Anything else will be an attempt by TV to convert it to 30fps. I shoot 60fps and render 2 versions: one retaining 60 (actually 59.94) and the other at 30 (29.97). The latter is for TV3. The former is for a (hopefully) future TV that can handle 60fps

How best to fixt that, is using something like handbrake the only option? is the difference between 60fps and 30fps enough that I'd notice a quality difference in the videos (when viewed on a source that could hand both)?

Keep your master files at 60fps. Its great advantage on equipment that can play it back is maximum smoothness of motion. It's worth keeping.

Handbrake is a great tool for down-converting 60fps to 30fps. Change one option in the render and out will come a 29.97 version- perfect for TV3.

Will you notice a quality difference in the videos? Maybe. It depends on how sharp your eyes are. In fast motion, sharp eyes will see the difference. However, 29.97 will look very good on TV3. And if that's your target playback device for now, 29.97fps is really your only option. Somebody(s) will inevitably post something that implies our eyes are not sensitive enough to see the additional fps but even some Hollywood movies are being shot at better than 30fps now. I shoot a lot of sports video and we can see the difference in fast motion playback (with less than perfect (or better-than-perfect) eyes.

Like I wrote above, keep your 60fps masters for the future. Maybe TV4 or 5+ will bring greater flexibility in the playback specs. If you go ahead and render a .m4v for both fps, when that day comes it will be easy to delete the 30fps versions and replace them with the 60fps versions.

 

[Aragornii]

Handbrake is a great tool for down-converting 60fps to 30fps. Change one option in the render and out will come a 29.97 version- perfect for TV3.

Thanks very much for the response and my apologies if this is dense, but is there a way for Handbrake to just adjust the FPS but leave all else unchanged. I can run it through on the ATV3 setting and it comes out just fine, but I can't tell if there is a way I can change the framerate and leave all else unchanged.

 

[simsaladimbamba]

 

[Aragornii]

snip

Thanks for the post. I did see that option but wasn't sure if there were other parameters that were being affected.

Now here is a more challenging question. Is it possible to preserve the date created on the video clip? I'm sure it's not via Handbrake. Is some sort of Apple script the way to go, or has anyone else solved the problem of converting video without changing the date created?

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

After you've created the file, you can tag it with metadata (including any dates you want) with programs like MetaZ, MetaX, Subler and many others.

 

[Aragornii]

After you've created the file, you can tag it with metadata (including any dates you want) with programs like MetaZ, MetaX, Subler and many others.

The problem with that is that I have 134 home videos to convert so manually changing dates is not an option. These are family home videos so the correct date and time is important.

While searching for batch input capabilities for Handbrake (again with 134 videos one-by-one scanning would be tedious to say the least) I came across HandBrakeBatch--an interface that uses the underlying Handbrake engine. What a great app! And it has a preferences checkbox to preserve the original creation and modification dates!!

So - I am passing along that recommendation. If you want to be able to convert multiple files by dragging and dropping, and want to save your original dates, this is a great little app.

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

I have about 134 home movies too. And yes, it was a bear when I initially converted them to modern digital files.

I tag them with tools like MetaX, MetaZ, etc so that they have nice little descriptions of their content. For me, a date... or a date and filename would not be enough to know which one had a nephew in his school play, or the daugther's better sporting events, etc.

So going to the trouble of tagging them yields DVD-like descriptions and poster art of each. Tagging them as "TV Shows" makes it easy to organize them by year in TV listings. If I want to see a kids 3rd birthday, I can go to the appropriate year; their 4th birthday video is in the next year. Family reunion 1996 is in the 1996 "season" while family reunion 2006 in is the 2006 "season". And so on.

When someone is over and they want to see some specific family memory (video), tagging them individually like this makes it very easy to find the right one. If I was going by just dates, it would involve more guessing (was the family reunion in July 2006, or June... or August? Was it the 2006 reunion where that (thing you want to see happened) or was it 2007 or 2005?

Yes, tagging them is a time-consuming hassle. But it's one of those jobs you only do once. And you may find it helpful for playback as your home movie collection (probably) continues to grow and grow for the rest of your life.

As is, my family doesn't need me to locate and play a particular home move from way back when. They just go into "TV Shows" on TV and use the descriptions to find the one they want to see. This may be the best reason to go to the trouble.

Just a suggestion- if what you are doing works fine for your needs, great!

 

[Menneisyys2]

The FPS is the culprit. TV can only play 30fps (actually 29.97).

Wrong. It (ATV3) has absolutely no problems playing back 1080p60 (that is, 60 fps progressive) videos via, say, Home Sharing. I've tested this with several clips; if you need, I can make them available.

The problem is very simple: the iOS hardware (incl. the ATV3) is simply incapable of playing back interlaced videos, unlike QuickTime Player under OS X. Not any kind of interlaced videos can be played back on it using hardware accelerated decoding - the only decoding type available on a non-jailbroken ATV3.

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Image

In addition to setting this, you WILL want to enable decombing. It's a more advanced and far superior form of traditional deinterlacing. (See https://trac.handbrake.fr/wiki/Decomb )

To do this, click Picture Settings in HB on the icon bar after loading the source video and, there, in the second tab, set the decomb drop-down list to "Default".

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Keep your master files at 60fps. Its great advantage on equipment that can play it back is maximum smoothness of motion. It's worth keeping.

Alternatively, you can use frame rate doubling, which essentially makes a 60 (59.994) fps progressive video out of interlaced. This is the preferred way to go as, as I've already pointed out, the ATV3 plays 1080p60 content just fine.

I'll elaborate a bit more on the different forms of this conversion. I myself use another app, Episode for this; however, x.264 is also capable of this (preferable, albeit at high qualities (Motion compensation), slow) conversion form.

EDIT: I may have been wrong, ATV3's 60p-compliance-wise; see the posts below. That is, only pay attention to the middle part of my post recommending decombing the interlaced content.

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

Wrong. It (ATV3) has absolutely no problems playing back 1080p60 (that is, 60 fps progressive) videos via, say, Home Sharing. I've tested this with several clips; if you need, I can make them available.

I shoot 60fps progressive. Lots of it! TV3 certainly does have problems with playback. There is a strobe effect. I've just tested this again recently with relatively low Kbps bit rate and it still doesn't work.

I suspect you think you have 60fps but actually have 30fps. Or, your 60fps doesn't involve a lot of panning motion thus it seems to play (but- I think- TV3 is actually dynamically down-converting to 30fps (just like it doesn't play 24fps either; it upconverts it to 30fps). Or it's 720p and you think it's 1080p. Or you have something formatted at 60fps but it's not actually got 60 UNIQUE frames per second, but only 30 with every frame doubled once. Thus, you don't see the strobe because it is effectively 30 unique frames, not 60.

Believe me, I wish you were right. I've got a couple years worth of 1080p60fps files that I would love to use with TV3. Instead, I have copies of them down-sampled to 30fps so that I can actually use them.

 

[Menneisyys2]

I shoot 60fps progressive. Lots of it! TV3 certainly does have problems with playback. There is a strobe effect.

OIC - I thought you referred to the ATV3's complete inability to play back anything over 30 fps, not "just" with stuttering while panning. I very frequently double the framerate while converting standard-def DVB TS files to MP4's with movies shot at 60p (e.g., "300") and, then, broadcast as 60i - but, they're, of course, SD movies, not HD ones; this is why I haven't run into any decoding problems.

Do you have such 1080p60 samples online (as original clips)? Having no 1080p60 camera (albeit will purchase the Sony RX100 very soon), I can't shoot quickly-panning videos myself and the original DPReview clips I've used for 60p testing (some examples: http://s3.amazonaws.com/movies.dpreview.com/sony_slta77/Video1.MTS (Sony A77); https://movies.dpreview.com.s3.amazonaws.com/sony_dscrx100/Bridge.MTS (Sony RX100); I've remuxed the videos to M4V files with iVI prior to playback) are almost all pretty much static.

(BTW, I've edited the original post.)

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While searching for batch input capabilities for Handbrake (again with 134 videos one-by-one scanning would be tedious to say the least) I came across HandBrakeBatch--an interface that uses the underlying Handbrake engine. What a great app! And it has a preferences checkbox to preserve the original creation and modification dates!!

So - I am passing along that recommendation. If you want to be able to convert multiple files by dragging and dropping, and want to save your original dates, this is a great little app.

Yup, HandBrakeBatch is great.

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

Nothing online. I don't shoot much to share (except with business clients or family). All of them are large files (too large for uploading). But I'm certain they don't play on TV- even with Kbps metrics dialed way down. Static video (shot on a tripod with no side-to-side movement) can look fine but as soon as the camera starts panning the strobing begins (unwatchable).

I can certainly believe it can dynamically adjust SD video at 60fps (but I still bet it's switching it to 30fps for actual playback, much like the TV2 would down-convert 1080p files to 720p (because that was it's output spec).

 

[Menneisyys2]

I can certainly believe it can dynamically adjust SD video at 60fps (but I still bet it's switching it to 30fps for actual playback

I'll shoot a 120 fps test video tomorrow to find out whether that's the case. All iPad generations play back 720p60 video just fine, showing every frame. I've used a 60 fps test video the video I've generated. It shows a counter incremented every frame: it's available at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13100693/html/072011TSVideoPlayback/60fps-2.mov (warning, pretty large!). The video uses a non-standard resolution (around XGA); will generate a Full HD one soon.

This is why I've thought the ATV3 does it too (after all, they share almost the same hardware and OS).

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

I'm under the impression that all of the other iDevice hardware is a bit more robust than TV3. As I understand, TV has a core turned off or inoperable, making it a single core (highly specialized) iDevice. Its dedicated 1080p hardware may indeed be capable of native 24p and 60p, so it may just be a software issue. However, Apple controls that software, so even if the hardware could handle it, it takes Apple deciding to support frame rates other than 30fps. The "hobby" doesn't get enough attention to fix some things removed in the new unit that worked well in the past (for example, try to have a dedicated poster for each episode of a TV show... and that's just ONE thing that worked well way back in the first generation of TV. Or try to group serial movies by "show"- for instance tagging all 6 Star Wars with the "Show" tag "Star Wars" so they will all be inside a dedicated folder in the movie list; that also worked great way back in gen 1. etc.).

I'll be curious to hear about your test. I'm very confident about it failing on real 60fps so 120fps should be a bigger fail. But let us know. I'd love to find a (non-hack) way to play my 60fps 1080p instead of having to maintain dual copies: one at 60fps (my masters) and a second at 30fps (for TV3)

 

[Menneisyys2]

I'll be curious to hear about your test. I'm very confident about it failing on real 60fps so 120fps should be a bigger fail. But let us know. I'd love to find a (non-hack) way to play my 60fps 1080p instead of having to maintain dual copies: one at 60fps (my masters) and a second at 30fps (for TV3)

Today, I've conducted some serious tests, including a "natural" panning camera video and the 1080p60 version of my previous counter synthetic benchmark (available for download at https://dl.dropbox.com/u/13100693/html/0921012ATV360fps/1080p60-counter.mp4 )

Unfortunately, the ATV3 indeed isn't able to render 1080p59.94 video with the same fluidity as the iPad 2/3.

While the playback of the 1080p60 counter (original video shot at 120 fps at https://dl.dropbox.com/u/13100693/html/0921012ATV360fps/atv3 1080p60 counter.MOV ) didn't show any dropped frames, the 1080p59.94 video did: the 120 fps shot at https://dl.dropbox.com/u/13100693/html/0921012ATV360fps/atv3 1080p5994 scroll.MOV certainly shows a very ugly stutter at 0:35. Both videos were pre-cached on the ATV3; that is, I only started playback after the ATV3 completely downloading the movies first.

Compare that to the iPad 3 test shot of the same video: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/13100693/html/0921012ATV360fps/ipad3 1080p5994 scroll.MOV . Absolutely no stuttering: yes, iPads have far more powerful video rendering.

EDIT: I've tested the panning video on my iPad 1 too. Definitely worse (more stuttering, particularly at the last quarter of the video) than on the ATV3. That is, the ATV3 is somewhere between the iPad1 and the 2/3, the latter two having exactly the same video rendering performance.

EDIT 2: I've commented out the URL's of the second set of benchmarks.

EDIT 3: URL's are back.

 

[Menneisyys2]

I'll be curious to hear about your test. I'm very confident about it failing on real 60fps so 120fps should be a bigger fail.

120 fps is only the benchmark recording I shoot. When it's played back, it shows what happens 4 times slower. Also, most desktop players allow for advancing this video frame-by-frame (VLC: "E" key; QuickTime: right arrow).

Shooting (max.) 60 fps playback at 120 fps means you'll see one 60 fps frame at least once in the target video - if not twice. The best way to determine whether every single frame is played back from the original 60 fps stream.