*Official* Popcorn Hour PCH-C200 Owners Thread - Page 9

Originally Posted by omii

Hey all,

Does anyone have a tried and true recipe for Handbrake MKV files that work nicely with the C200?

I read a thread (a long time ago) and used the recipe and on most movies it works ok. It is basically just choose high profile, then MKV container and set the constant quality at RF:22. In Audio I also add a 3rd track for DTS Passthru.

Here would be the media info for Beauty and the Beast, I don't want to litter the thread with it. This movie visually drops frames per second down to about 15fps constantly. What I need to do is pause it for a couple seconds and then hit play again. That or stop the movie and select it again (it picks up where it left off) and it plays fine for a while. Eventually it will start bogging down to (what I loosely estimate) to be around 15fps, very boggy. Audio never studders, it's just the video, and it never pauses to buffer or anything, just continues bogging until I pause/play it.

Some movies play fine the whole time, but all I really use this unit for is my kids movies and it's all Pixar stuff, and that's where most of the issues come from.

For the record it bogs equally being fed off an internal 1TB ext3/nmt 7200.12 drive as well as an external WD USB 1.5TB drive.

However..

The MKV is typically 3-6GB for a full blu-ray movie. The ISO that I make the MKV from is an AnyDVD HD rip that sits around 40GB-55GB. The ISO plays perfectly fine and never studders. It's clearly a MKV encoding issue. If it can play a 55GB file flawlessly, certainly can't be a hardware issue playing a 3GB MKV.

Any tips on a good MKV recipe with Handbrake (or any other software aside MakeMKV) are appreciated!

Originally Posted by omii

I think it just may be me bumping the quality to 22 as the article said. I'm going to try degrading it back down to 20 (which is high profiles default) and see if it goes away.

I keep the HD audio because I'm an audiophile and have a decent surround setup. I figured the less compression on the audio the less the system would need to do to feed it also. You can clearly see the AC3 is a lot smaller on track 2 although it's a 6.1 feed. I could of course be wrong but all 3 audio tracks make no difference, the video bogs equally.

It's a bummer I didn't notice it until I've spent like 3 weeks of computer time crunching each pixar/dreamworks cartoon at almost 5 hours a pop just to find out the recipe was wrong.. Oy vey.

Thanks for the tips on other sofware.

If anyone else sees anything wrong in that metadata or something I should tweak in Handbrake I'd love to know. Thanks!

edit:

Just mentioning I'm trying to look for something free because I already purchased AnyDVD HD so I use that to rip an unprotected ISO to one of my HDs before I ever handbrake it. So any software is fine, it's already unprotected. I noticed if I rip straight from BDROM to HD using Handbrake without ripping with AnyDVD first it takes almost twice as long, no idea why. So I keep a clean unprotected 50GBish ISO and mount that via slysoft virtual drive and then rip that with Handbrake.

I looked at BluRip and Ripbot264 and I don't see really any difference. They seem to all require the same libraries. So this just seems like a issue of setting up handbrake properly.

Originally Posted by omii

I did wonder why dragging the quality bar to the right decreased the number. I encoded a couple movies to 20 and 21 and in viewing them on a PC monitor I noticed a bit more blocking on the movie encoded to 20 than to 22, 21 looked best. I only did one quick chapter as a test run. I'm sure there's a reason.

I do enjoy chapters and multiple audio streams which is the only reason I go MKV.


So which direction would make more sense. Would I have a better chance at better playback with a file that's smaller but more compressed, or larger and less compressed? I take it would come down to understanding the hardware decoder and I'm not sure which is better.

Originally Posted by gtgray

I am trying to make sense of the variations on the PopCorn Hour.

What is the PopBox? Is this a newer/cheaper take.. which variant has the best chipset? I also notice availability seems to be something of a problem.

Originally Posted by Carl Jones

I thank you for this response too. I have tried to find answers to the following questions on Wiki without success, perhaps you can help?

I have the A200 which works fine for me EXCEPT handling more than 2 external (usb) drives. I have 1 1.5T Seagate, 1 1T WD & 1 1.5T WD, all powered. Any two attached work fine, but when I attach a third, the PCH spins for awhile but then tells me it cannot process (or something similar). I have tried 3 different powered usb hubs but get the same results. Any thoughts on why this might be occuring?
Which leads to my second question, would purchasing/upgrading to the C200 offer be any better chance for success?

Again, I have tried researching forums on Wiki & cannot find answers. Perhaps the answers are there, but I haven't uncovered them. Any help here would be most welcomed.