I want to start using QuickTime player in macOS to watch my DVR recordings as I really don’t like using Safari for playback.
When opening the file in QuickTime there is no audio. I have fiddled with a few settings to see if I can find a solution but nothing seems to work.
Any thoughts?
I just tried a recording and it works fine for me. Everything is playing fine.
Does it play properly with IINA? Which is an excellent media player, better than QuickTime Player in many ways.
I've just come across this problem and it looks like Perian development has stopped and I've tried installing the last release and struggle in Big Sur due to security stuff in macOS.
IINA does work though. Quicktime has quite a nice tool for trimming files which IINA lacks. Anyone got any tips for a tool that plays sound and allows trimming or a plugin pack that works in Big Sur?
Big Sur can play back MPEG-2 without plugins. Make sure you remove the old a52 extension that installed with Perian. It’s causing the security warning and breaking audio. (I think it’s in /Library/QuickTime/ by default.)
Big Sur doesn't playback audio for me. I never had Perian installed so nothing to remove.
I'm thinking you have something else installed that's conflicting with QuickTimes's built-in codecs. I'm on Big Sur (11.2.3) on a new M1 MacBook Pro, and Channels .mpg recordings play back fine for me, including audio, in QuickTime Player.
Probably the only software I have installed that might conceivably interfere would be Parallels but that would be very surprising.
I had to do a clean install in December so there isn’t been long to acquire historical garbage.
It's a pain, but try creating a new local user account and see if the problem replicates there.
As expected, it's no different with a fresh user account.
Perhaps this is an issue with UK broadcasts?
Hmm. This directory was mentioned above. Do you have any files installed in Macintosh HD -> Library -> QuickTime? If so, they would apply to all user accounts. Just checking, trying to help. Hmm.
Thanks. There is no such folder on my Mac.
Hmm, I'm running out of ideas, perhaps there is something different with UK broadcasts? But the fact that these files do play with IINA and that Channels isn't having any issue with them, I'm guessing no.
That said, one utility I can recommend that helped a friend figure out what leftover software causing him similar issues, is EtreCheck: https://etrecheck.com. It basically scans for anything deep in your system not from Apple and helps you figure out what else might be causing a problem.
Any chance you could post a short (<60 seconds) recording to Dropbox or something?
Here you go: https://www.dropbox.com/s/22nri9ued84mzda/BBC%20News%202008-03-01%202021-03-21-0925.mpg?dl=1
Hmm, well, this is interesting, I'm not hearing audio from that file either. Makes me wonder if the issue is with your Channels DVR server and how its recording the file, and not necessarily the Mac you're trying to play it back with.
Here is "Get Info" compared to one of my recordings, where audio plays back fine.
I posted this in the other thread.
Dave
I was playing with the sample file Robin uploaded to Dropbox. And yeah, it looks like QuickTime just ignores an MP4 audio track if it's inside a LATM container.
Which lead me to this interesting and old ffmpeg bug report, which suggests it's out of spec:
https://trac.ffmpeg.org/ticket/3244
"no sense in putting a container into a container"
I'm too lazy/dim to read and understand the spec, but I worry that makes it harder to convince Apple to fix the bug. And I'm sure the BBC stands by its encoding practices.
It's not the "BBC's encoding practices" - the Freeview standard is mandated by the Digital TV Group https://dtg.org.uk in their "D-Book" which is (of course) only available to members!
The items I was looking at were recorded from Ch4.
I've tried reading the specs as well but they're so labyrinthine that I lost the will to live.
Dave
