avi: alright with mediaplayer, virtualdub fails

[engel]

I have an avi which does not play via one of those HDD-2-TV boxes (Freecom MediaPlayer-3), but it plays alright (video and audio) both in vlc 086c and MediaplayerC 6.4.9.1. The latter says the following about that file (Shift F10/Details):

Video: MPEG4 Video 544x416 [MPEG4 video (eng)]
Audio: AAC 44100Hz stereo 79Kbps [Nero Digital Audio 2-ch Unspecifi]

DVdate 7.0.9En states the following:

--------------- Start of Avi RIFF ---------------
>>> There are 2AF5ADE2 bytes of garbage at the end of the file

Virtualdub (several versions, e.g. 1.7.8) all say "cannot detect file type".

Now in order to make that movie "mediaPlayer compatible", I still would like to recompress it.

Any suggestions are very much appreciated.

Siggi E.

[Baldrick]

I would reconvert to avi xvid with mp3 audio using avi recomp or autogk.

[jagabo]

It's probably not an AVI file. My guess is it's an MP4 file. Use GSpot or MediaInfo to determine the container and other details about the file. Does your player support the MP4 container?

[engel]

hey, thanks for those rapid hints. I'll try them and post my results. The statement by mediaplayer c that it is a mpeg4 file I cannot interpret - after all, xvid, divx all are mpeg4 derivatives, right? Still virtualdub obviously is lacking something vlc and the mediaplayer classic both have.

Cheers

Siggi

[jagabo]

There are containers and codecs. AVI, MPG, MP4, MKV, etc are containers. They can contain video and audio compressed with any number of codecs.

MPEG 4 is a codec -- well, several. Divx and Xvid are MEPG 4 part 2 codecs (aka ASP). h.264 is MPEG 4 part 10 (aka AVC).

Most media players can identify the container based on content, not just the filename extension. Video editors usually cannot identify the container if it is misnamed. Editors also support fewer different cntainers. Given that VirtualDub can't identify the file type it is not an AVI file, even if someone named it that. Before you can work with the file you need to know the container and the codecs.

[engel]

Hi Baldrick, hi Jagabo,

Thanks again for your suggestions/hints.

Recompressing that file with avirecomp did not work, since it was declared not to be a valid avi by avirecomp. Still that program would seem to be quite nice, I never heard of it before (always used Gordian Knot etc according to those doom9 instructions).

So Jajabo was right in his/her speculation about the container. Quite naively, I must confess, I thought I knew something about these video files - but I was wrong. Never heard before about containers etc. and still do not understand the difference between the codecs, containers and God knows.

Anyway, here is the statement by Mediainfo, yet another unknown tool for me, but seems quite instructive:

Format : MPEG-4
Format profile : Base Media / Version 1
Codec ID : mp41
File size : 687 MiB
Duration : 1h 24min
Overall bit rate : 1132 Kbps
Encoded date : UTC 2005-03-21 15:43:08
Tagged date : UTC 2005-03-21 15:43:08

Video
Format : MPEG-4 Visual
Format profile : Streaming Video@L1
Format settings, BVOP : yes
Format settings, QPel : no
Format settings, GMC : No warppoints
Format settings, Matrix : Default
Codec ID : 20
Duration : 1h 24min
Bit rate mode : Variable
Bit rate : 1045 Kbps
Maximum bit rate : 3525 Kbps
Width : 544 Pixel
Height : 416 Pixel
Display aspect ratio : 4/3
Frame rate mode : Constant
Frame rate : 1.000 FPS
Original frame rate : 25.000 FPS
Resolution : 8 bits
Colorimetry : 4:2:0
Scan type : Progressive
Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 4.619
Stream size : 635 MiB (92%)
Writing library : em4v 4.1.6.5
Language : Englisch
Encoded date : UTC 2005-03-21 15:43:08
Tagged date : UTC 2005-03-21 15:43:08

Audio
Format : AAC
Format/Info : Advanced Audio Codec
Format version : Version 4
Format profile : LC
Format settings, SBR : Nein
Codec ID : 40
Duration : 1h 24min
Bit rate mode : Variable
Bit rate : 80.0 Kbps
Maximum bit rate : 83.2 Kbps
Channel(s) : 2 Kanäle
Channel positions : L R
Sampling rate : 44.1 KHz
Resolution : 16 bits
Stream size : 48.6 MiB (7%)
Title : Nero Digital Audio 2-ch Unspecifi
Encoded date : UTC 2005-03-21 15:43:08
Tagged date : UTC 2005-03-21 15:43:08

Kapitel
1 : 00:00:00.000 - Chapter 1

Once again, I wonder whether there is a chance to make this file "VirtualDub" (or avirecomp) compatible, since I recompressed some files, which would not play via TV otherwise, successfully (as mentioned before).

And since I got into this by now quite a bit, I wonder where to find some basics about them containers etc.?

Thanks a lot for your assistance with this issue

Cheers

Siggi

[jagabo]

If you have VirtualDub 1.8.x install the MP4 source plugin from:

http://forums.virtualdub.org/index.php?act=ST&f=7&t=12664&s=45c27a76cb3b999a09a214a28142a4a9

That will allow VirtualDub to open MP4 files.

[engel]

one step further, but still far from success: With vf 1.8.3 and the plugin you mentioned vd now complains about the missing codec. How can mplayerc play that video without the required codec?

[jagabo]

Ah yes, you need a VFW MP41 decoder. If you have ffdshow installed it includes a VFW MP41 decoder (just enable it). Or find the old Microsoft MPEG 4 V1 codec somewhere.

[engel]

Alright, these suggestions required some more efforts. Finally VirtualDub now accepts that file, but it does not display any file information and crashes when I attempt to reencode it with xvid. It outputs, though, an ffdshow file.

At this point, I cannot decide whether my TV would accept such a file but will try it out. Still I would feel much more happy if I could convert the file exactly into what I've converted those files into before, i.e. xvid/mp3-avi.

[jagabo]

AviDemux can read many different containers, has most codecs built in, and can convert to many different containers and codecs.

[poisondeathray]

Another option if that doesn't work:

You should be able to do it all in avidemux. You could stream copy the video, but I bet you would have to convert the audio to mp3 (unless your player supports aac audio) - note that vdub doesn't handle aac audio very well natively

Video=>copy
Audio=>mp3
Format=>avi
Press save with extension (e.g. "myfile.avi")

[engel]

Ok, I tried avidemux and at least I do not get any crashes and the video shows up alright (after some time) in the preview window. I started conversion with the suggested settings (video: copy, audio: mp3, format:avi) and the program started working. Since the entire process was scheduled to last 300 hours+ I stopped it and will give it another try later on. This looks pretty promising, so far. But sill: What a hassle with all those videos!

Thank you all very much for your help. Stay tuned and have a nice weekend. Siggi

[poisondeathray]

300hours?! It shouldn't take more than an hour given your computer specs - you are only converting audio. I suspect that your file is damaged, and I doubt this will work. What's weird is mediainfo is reporting your video fps as 1.

Since it plays normally with the DirectShow filters installed on your system on MPC, you could use an .avs script with DirectShowSource() to feed it into an encoder. If you specify audio=true in the script, vdub should be able to handle the whole thing. Of course, the problem is you will be re-encoding the whole thing, but I think you were OK with that judging from your initial post.

Another option would be extracting the raw streams with yamb, and put those into a new container, then doing the conversion; this is preferable since only the audio is converted, but it has a lower likelihood of success than the method above

[engel]

I tried avidemux more extensively. In fact, it did NOT take 300h+ to copy the video, convert the audio and assemble them into an avi, but rather 35 min or so. The 300+ figure must have arisen from some faulty estimation, possibly based upon file data. Anyway, although audio of the output seemed ok, video was just a black window. Another try to convert both audio and video WOULD have resulted in many many hours of processing - it took almost one hour to process 100 frames out of 21000. So I cancelled that. YAMB proved not to be helpful and since I am not very familiar with the deeper layers of video processing, i.e. totally unable of writing scripts etc. I think I give up at this point. It is demanding too much.

Perhaps that file initially way prepared for ipod use or whatever, or maybe some proprietary tricks designed to keep that movie from being converted.

I would like to thank all those involved once again for their efforts!

Cheers

Siggi