When I play compressed mp4's with my Zidoo player, they play fine as long as I only pause or resume. If I try to change the position by fast forwarding or rewinding the audio gets out of sync with the video. I can't resync it unless I just start from the beginning. Not a good experience. I get that Zidoo players are designed to play back lossless remux files, and it does that very well. My entire movie library is lossless mkv's. However, I have over 6,000 TV show episodes I ripped and encoded with Handbrake as mp4's years ago. It would take ages to redo them all from the disks. Is there a way I can convert these mp4's that will enable me to fast forward/rewind and keep the audio in sync with the video? Or, is my only option to redo them all as lossless mkv? @Markswift2003 You are the SME here, can you offer any suggestions sir?
Use MKVToolnix to convert losslessly and very quickly (no encoding) to mkv. You can do batch operations or script it but I’d suggest trying a couple manually first as I’ve not seen this behaviour with mp4.
Wow, that did it! And it was super fast. Thank you! It's so weird they have to be in an mkv container for the audio to stay in sync. I really wish I didn't have to do this, but it's been than going through all the discs again.
I can confirm this process. I go one step further for series with long episode timing, I use an old program called Chapterizer and create chapters every 4 minutes. You can then advance in 4 or whatever you have chosen on the remote. It is equally fast.
Yes I know but more of a creature of habit having used Chapterizer long before MKVToolNix was all that friendly. "Old dogs.....!"
I think part of the problem is with MP4’s as exactly the same problem occurred on the Popcorn and Beyonwiz. Media players as far as navigation goes. A guru over on the Popcorn forum wrote it was because the index is located at the end of the mp4 file whilst with mkv it’s at the head. The same advice as Mark Swift gave, wrap the mp4 file in a mkv container and problem solved. So if you are simply playing a movie and not doing much navigation back and forth they are fine. Anyway mkv are far more flexible with subtitle types numerous additional audio tracks etc.
Thanks Netmask. I wrote a simple little app to do the conversion to mkv as I'm not a big script guy. It took 6 days to do about 6,000 TV episodes and about 1000 movies. Everything I've played so far works fine. I did have to change my view to "Overscan" or else the poster wall is unusable. I know there's other threads about that.
