Hello group!
I am looking for help with playback issues of specific "The Office" episodes which I have ripped from original blu-ray discs. I started ripping the entire series from the original discs using MakeMKV. The process worked well, until I got to Season 5, Episode 22. That's when I noticed the codec from the rip changed from H264 to VC1. The container is still MKV, with no other changes made to the ripped files - I just tell MakeMKV to rip the episodes to a local hard drive and that's it.
The problem is that all VC1 encoded episodes are having issues with video on the playback. Playback devices are Apple TV 4K's wired in via ethernet, using the latest version of the Channels app. The episodes will start playing fine, but after a variable length of time the video playback will start to get extremely choppy. The best way I can describe it would be the frame rate changing to about 1-2 frames per second. Obviously this is very noticeable and very annoying. The audio continues playing just fine, no skips, no issues.
I can immediately correct the problem by pausing and resuming playback, or backing out of the playback to the menu and resuming playback again. The episode will then continue for a little while just fine, until the choppy video problem comes back again.
There hasn't been any repeatable length of time that I can nail down for when the problem starts. On any given VC1 encoded episode it will happen anywhere from 2-4 times per episode, and the length of time before the problem starts varies. If I just let the episode play through on its own, eventually the choppy video will resolve itself as well, by speeding up drastically, until the video is caught up to where the "live" audio is at in the episode. But the problem will still come back a little while later.
So, short of re-encoding each VC1 episode to something else to get ride of that codec, is there anything else I can do to avoid this issue? Thanks for any suggestions folks might have!