[vlc] VLC, h.264, many (8+) b-frames and matroska.

[Nathan Caldwell]

Hi, I'm a HandBrake developer. I'm working on HandBrake's matroska
muxer, and have a question.
When I attempt to use VLC to playback h.264 files with many bframes
(anything greater than 8 consecutive), I get massive frame drops
(about smeared frame every 2-3 seconds), and audio stuttering. The
same file plays just fine in MPlayer (all the way up to 16 bframes).
Also, if I do the same encode, but use mp4 instead of matroska there
are no playback issues. I'm trying to determine if this is an issue
with our matroska matroska, or with VLC. Are there any known issues
that VLC has problems with h.264 with many bframes and matroska? I
tested with remuxing our output (or the raw stream from x264 cli) with
mkvmerge and this results in the same issue, and the matroska output
of x264 cli causes vlc to just hang completely (even without bframes)
without displaying anything. Again, MPlayer and gstreamer to best of
my testing play all these streams fine.
I'm using the latest VLC in Gentoo's portage (git snapshot dated
20080409). I attempted  to test with a newer git HEAD, but that failed
to compile.


-- 
-Nathan Caldwell