Cannot seek in mkv video

[fhucho]

Hi,
I downloaded a .mkv movie, about 4.5GB large and mplayer can play it smoothly. But unfortunately I can't seek in the file (in other words when I want to move forward or backward in the movie, mplayer says "Cannot seek in this file..."). With ffplay, seeking works, but playback is not smooth. I have Ubuntu Jaunty, mplayer 1.0rc2-4.3.3.
Do you have an idea what can be causing this?

[andrew.46]

Hi fhucho,

There are a few things to experiment with perhaps but I have no certain answer I am afraid :(. The easiest thing to do is to run mplayer with -forceidx:


mplayer -forceidx myfile.mkv

Another option is to try a much more recent version of MPlayer, either compile your own from a guide on these forums or install from RVM's PPA, both options easy enough to find on these forums.

A final option would be to re-create the container with FFmpeg with something like:


ffmpeg -i myfile.mkv -acodec copy -vcodec copy my_newfile.mkv

Hopefully one of these options will help,

Andrew

[x33a]

The easiest thing to do is to run mplayer with -forceidx:


mplayer -forceidx myfile.mkv
Thanks, I was facing a similar seek problem with an h.264 encoded mkv. This option fixed it for me.

[andrew.46]

Hi x33a,


Thanks, I was facing a similar seek problem with an h.264 encoded mkv. This option fixed it for me.

Great news :). The -forceidx option can be seen in the man pages:


-forceidx
Force index rebuilding. Useful for files with broken index (A/V
desync, etc). This will enable seeking in files where seeking
was not possible. You can fix the index permanently with MEn-
coder (see the documentation)

but I have not experimented with the suggested MENcoder command to permanently rebuild the index:


mencoder input.avi -idx -ovc copy -oac copy -o output.avi

as I have moved completely to FFmpeg for transcoding video...

Andrew

[x33a]

I wasted hours trying to reencode the video using avidemux, but the resulting video was always out of sync, and even mplayer's audio delay option seemed to have no effect.

Then i found this thread through google, and the option fixed it for me. though i too didn't try mencoder since it was just an anime episode and i deleted it after watching it.

[keppel]

Hi fhucho,

The easiest thing to do is to run mplayer with -forceidx:


mplayer -forceidx myfile.mkv

Andrew

Thanks, that really works! It took me a whole night trying to mess with the configuration file...