H.264 to AVI wont play in Quicktime

[kerr1586]

Hi, newb to file conversion so please excuse any obvious retardedness..

I have a large volume of video files recorded on a surveillance style DVR box in H.264 format. I need them in an AVI format that will play with QuickTime. I need to use QuickTime as I’m going to analyse the video with logger pro.

I have muxed the H.264 file to AVI using "AVC2AVI2 which produce a file that plays in MPC and Ifranview (i know strange) but is poorly displayed in VLC and won't load in QuickTime. I converted the new AVI file again using MeGui (XVid encoder) to another .avi file and i produced a nice file that plays in all players smoothly and loads quickly but when i load it in QuickTime it loads and plays but the screen is blank. I don't know why this is!!?

Help please?

Jim

[Selur]

1st Quicktime only supports a subsection of the MPEG-4 ASP and AVC Standard, so only H.264 and Xvid streams that follow the Quicktime restrictions will be playable by quicktime (there's also a DivX and a Xvid Component for Quicktime and both might help with the playback of Xvid MPEG-4 ASP streams)
2nd better mux to mov or mp4 than avi since they are both better supported through Quicktime

[kerr1586]

Ok, the fact that quicktime only supports subsections of H.264 would explain a few things....

What program should i use to mux avi straight to mov??

[Selur]

ffmpeg should be able to do it:

ffmpeg.exe -i "path to input file" -vcodec copy -acodec copy -f mov "path to output file"

but only reencoding the stream will help if H.264 stream is not Quicktime compatible,..
also don't forget the audio,.. neither mov nor Quicktime do support a lot of audio formats
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickTime might help a bit,..

Cu Selur