x265 in .mkv format mostly (or all?) black screen

[jkantr]

Hi - it appears that all videos I try to play using x265 compression (and in mkv format) are just black screen. The rest of the features / functions appear to work just fine.

Is this expected behavior? Is adding x265 support something I can work on possibly? (I have reasonably extensive node.js experience, with some electron experience, and minimal video-based experience).

If this isn't expected behavior... is it possible there's some system-wide stuff I need to add to get this working properly? Most of my library is in this format. Thanks.

Edit: Okay - I see the giant note in the README now about x265 not being supported. Is there a pathway to get this implemented? I see the distributed ffmpeg appears to be built with the --enable-libx265 flag... so that isn't the problem. I might be able to carve out some time to work on it if i can be given some direction and you accept PRs, thanks.

[jkantr]

Just for anyone else wondering:

• Yes it's possible
• It currently appears to involve a custom build of electron using a custom build of chromium that has a custom build of ffmpeg
• Probably at some point in the future it will "just work" when updating electron, but no idea where that point is.

I'll probably just resort to transcoding the part of my library I care about for now.

[jkantr]

Another update! It would appear this should be fairly stable as of chromium v78~ish... and the newer versions of electron are using chromium ~v8x... so in theory this should "just work" if the version of electron built with is updated and there's no pitfalls. May give it a go later.

[jkantr]

Last update - it would appear that even with newest stable electron/chromium, this still isn't a supported thing out of the box. It would involve custom builds of ffmpeg -> chromium -> electron afaict. Feel free to leave this open / close it / whatever for future reference.

[rajlego]

I'm guessing you've resorted to transcoding then, any suggestions on mass conversion from x265?

[SpongebobSquamirez]

I heard chromium added support for h.265 out of the box - does this work now? How can we update electron/voracious to take advantage of this support?