MP4 won't play in VLC, but opens in other players - how do I convert this?

[Daemach]

Guru challenge:

I want to use this as a desktop background. I've seen it played before (https://www.screencast.com/t/AfCj2ocy) but VLC won't open it. Windows Movies and TV opens it, but it goes straight to the end frame and will not play (it's only 16 seconds long). Is there an expert here that can tell me how to use FFMPEG batch converter or some other batcher that can grok the format to convert these to a standard .264 mp4 that will play anywhere?

Thanks in advance! See attached.

[poisondeathray]

The reason is you have 2 videos muxed in the container. Stream 0 and 1 . Stream 0 is just two frames. Because it's stream number is "zero" it's the default stream for most players. Stream 1 is the longer 16s version but a "photo negative" . You need to invert the colors if you want it to look "normal"


e.g just stream copy the longer stream

ffmpeg -i "Beach 015.mp4" -map 0:1 -c:v copy -movflags +faststart copy.mp4

eg. same as above, but inverting the colors. But inverting the colros requires re-encoding

 
ffmpeg -i "Beach 015.mp4" -map 0:1 -vf negate -c:v libx264 -crf 20 -movflags +faststart negate.mp4

[Daemach]

Brilliant! Thank you!