Lately while trying to play some H.264 encoded movies they have started pausing during playback. Checking the server I could see that they were being transcoded. I thought this was odd as I thought the XBOXone handled H.264 playback. Some further investigation showed that some H.264 files were being transcoded, whereas others weren't. I thought it might be bitrate related, however the ones that weren't being transcoded had a higher bitrate in some cases.
I went looking at the XML's for the differing files and I noticed differences in the video stream description section.
This one transcodes when it plays in an XBOXone:
<Stream id="41371" streamType="1" codec="h264" index="0" bitrate="25073" language="English" languageCode="eng" bitDepth="8" cabac="1" chromaSubsampling="4:2:0" codecID="V_MPEG4/ISO/AVC" duration="7142392" frameRate="23.976" frameRateMode="cfr" hasScalingMatrix="1" height="1080" level="41" pixelFormat="yuv420p" profile="high" refFrames="2" requiredBandwidths="23894,23769,23554,23219,22904,22589,21964,21964" scanType="progressive" width="1920" />
This one doesn't:
<Stream id="113596" streamType="1" codec="h264" index="0" bitrate="27299" language="English" languageCode="eng" bitDepth="8" cabac="1" chromaSubsampling="4:2:0" codecID="V_MPEG4/ISO/AVC" colorRange="tv" colorSpace="bt709" duration="7271271" frameRate="23.976" frameRateMode="cfr" hasScalingMatrix="0" height="1080" level="41" pixelFormat="yuv420p" profile="high" refFrames="4" scanType="progressive" width="1920" />
Both were produced by makeMKV. Does this header information come from the original disc?
What do the different flags mean?
Any help would be appreciated, thanks. (Yes I know if I had a faster server to transcode quicker I wouldn't need to do this, however I am interested to know)