MrMC

I just got on the MRMC bandwagon because I have yet another TV and I needed yet another box to run Kodi. When I found out I could get a similar experience using MRMC on my Apple TV, I was pretty excited. Unfortunately, I ran into a problem that I know is related to an older FFMPEG implementation.

Essentially there was an FFMPEG bug that existed for several years where a portion of my music video rips would register as having no audio channel (ripped from DVD via DVD Decrypter). I don't understand why it affects some and not all, but it's a non-trivial amount. This was fixed last year in FFMPEG, and as a result, was fixed in Kodi v19 (it was introduced in v16).

Is there an expected timeline for integrating a newer version of FFMPEG in MRMC? I know the Testflight stuff is closed at the moment, but I also didn't see anything definitive about FFMPEG being updated in those beta builds. Thank you in advance.

There are no plans to update ffmpeg, it’s not as simple as bumping the version and compiling.

@davilla might have more insight on what it would take, or maybe post what the actual issue is and we can look into it.(debuglog and a sample to begin with)

Here's a link to one of the affected videos:

https://gofile.io/d/1Q3qjH

Honestly, I don't think there's a need for a MRMC debug log in this situation, as it's an FFMPEG-specific issue. The LPCM track is detected as MLP with 0 channels. I did some in-depth testing a while back and can confirm with pre-built Windows binaries that it was introduced between FFMPEG v3.0.1 and 3.1.4, then was fixed somewhere between 4.2.3 and 4.3. Short of compiling my own FFMPEG builds or hunting down interim releases, I can't say exactly where the problem was fixed. It *appears* like it's the same bug as this one, but the fix date says 3 years ago, so that seems inconsistent with when it was actually fixed in FFMPEG

https://trac.ffmpeg.org/ticket/6563

Should be easy to patch in the ffmpeg we have

I'll push an update soon, please see this for testflight -> https://forum.mrmc.tv/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=5653

That's great news! I do certainly understand that updating FFMPEG to the newest version is non-trivial, especially if there are a lot of customizations in the code. Things can (WILL) break, and it takes a while to figure out what is broken. Still, it's at least good to know that fixes in FFMPEG can be easily ported to MRMC's fork, and very quickly apparently. I'll confirm the fix once it's been pushed out to Testflight. Thank you for addressing this.