Unable to play .MP4

[sanjayk]

Hi to all

Its good to be back on this exciting forum after a long holiday. To start with ..

I have a file with .MP4 extention. But I am not able to play this file with anything. Also TMPGEnc, NVE etc are not able to open it. Gsopt also indicates unknown type. But I guess I have 3ivx installed. I tried to use MP4UI to split the file but it indicates invalid video type. Although audio seems ok.





Is there any way to get around the problem otherwise I will be happy to trash the file.

[Baldrick]

Have you installed a mp4 container codec like haali media splitter? But it wont help if you don't have the video codec though....and the "invalid" could be anything...you could try ffdshow.

[sanjayk]

Thanx. I have downloaded the haali media splitter and will try it a bit later.

[celtic_druid]

MP4UI is out of date and buggy. You might want to try something else like mp4box (part of GPAC).

[Baldrick]

Or yamb, a newer gui for mp4box.

[Raga]

Try Quicktime? Some MP4 files I've been only able to open with that.

[sanjayk]

I have been able to split my MP4 file with yamb to .aac (audio) & .h264 (video) files. Gspot tells me I dont have the H264 codec. How to get it? Is quicktime 7 the only option. Also how to convert AAC audio to any other format.

[Hyper Shinchan]

You can use Nero to convert aac to another format, and there is an AVC/H.264 codec with Nero Reaload 6 too. I don't know about free software.

[Baldrick]

ffdshow can decode h264. you might have to select it manually in the configuration, under codecs->h264->libavcodec.

http://www.free-codecs.com/download/FFDShow.htm

[celtic_druid]

Or yamb, a newer gui for mp4box.

MP4UI was/is based on mpeg4ip not GPAC.

Yep, ffdshow as long as it is recent decodes AVC/h.264 fine.

[sanjayk]

Thanx. I am on the move now. I will post the result with ffdshow later.

[Baldrick]

i maybe should remove mp4ui from the tools list if it isn't developed anymore and when it is so bugggy.

[sanjayk]

Just loaded the latest ver of ffdshow and now I am able to play the file with MPC and Nero Showtime. Although Nero does shows a message about patent licencing ... blah blah ...

Once again thanx to all.

[Hyper Shinchan]

i maybe should remove mp4ui from the tools list if it isn't developed anymore and when it is so bugggy.

No, it can give some useful infos about the mp4 files, it should aslo show the encoder I've read in Doom9, but I'm not able to do this (you should use mp4ui for the muxing, but how?). It's better to leave it (just make an advertisement for the users).

[celtic_druid]

As I understand it, mp4ui reports the encoder only if the mp4 was muxed via mp4ui. Other apps show it always if present in the bitstream (i.e. really old XviD builds did not include such info).

I agree though, perhaps a warning and a link to alternatives such as Yamb, mp4box, mpeg4ip, etc.

mpeg4iptools for instance now supports high profile AVC. So if the author was finally to get around to updating mp4ui then it would no longer be an issue. Well it (mpeg4ip) still doesn't support pb avi's, but they could do something about that to.

[sanjayk]

To move on and talk about conversion in the same thread...

I tried to convert MP4 file to the still more usable format, MPEG-2, using Nero Vision Express but it did a lousy job. The audio was many seconds out of sync. And the video also froze from time to time. WinAVI converter also gave the same result. (Dont these all-in-one converters behave the same !!)

I used the good old & trustworthy TMPGEnc Plus. TMPGenc did not recognize the audio. So I extracted the audio to WAV using Goldwave. It took around 45 min on my system to do that !!! Haali Media Splitter is required for this otherwise Goldwave will not recognize the audio. I loaded the MP4 file directly for the video stream and the extracted WAV audio for the audio stream. The result was a perfect MPEG-2 file with NO audio video sync problem.

Is there anything to change in TMPGEnc to make it recognize audio from the MP4 container itself.