Sunday, September 23, 2012

Handbrake Lipsync and Roku

I occasionally have lipsync problems with Roku when encoding videos with Hanbrake. Handbrake does not appear to give you any control over audio or video delay. In theory, if the source is correctly synchronized the output should be synchronized as well. In practice that works only with VLC but not with Roku.
I found that the profile selection affects lipsync the most. I am not sure why that is, but Roku handles high profile poorly as far as audio synchronization goes. I performed several tests and all of them came out with the same result - audio is ahead by about 1 second. VLC plays these videos correctly but in Windows Media Player lipsync is off the same way as Roku. This can serve as a test - if WMP plays video correctly, Roku will too.
What is interesting that the "Preview" does not show any issues in WMP or VLC, therefore checking just preview alone would not help. You would need to encode about 10 minutes of video to judge correctly.
If you are encoding lower quality file, it does not make sense to encode in high profile as the source is already low quality. If you want to preserve quality as much as you can, adjust "Quality" slider in the "Video" tab to 18-19. You will get a bit better quality at the expense of the file size.
At this moment my recommendation would be to stick with "Normal" preset when encoding for Roku, especially for lower quality content.

No comments: