Creating video files larger than 1 GB with mencoder, important hint

[penguin74]

I recently ran into trouble when I created a large AVI with mencoder. The hardware player in the living room only played the first hour and suddenly stopped.

There seems to be a general 2 GB size limit (regarding hardware players) that generally forces you to create files shorter than 2 GB, but if you use mencoder you will also have to deal with a 1 GB limit! Mencoder will write an OpenDML index every GB and many hardware player cannot deal with this and stop playing. Don't ask me why mencoder is doing this.

To avoid this there is an -noodml option you *have* to use if you want to play your file on a hardware player.

Thus, to create video files larger than 1 GB the command could look like this:

mencoder source.mpg -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4 -oac mp3lame -noodml -ffourcc DX50 -o film.avi

Hopefully this -noodml hint will be useful for others, I spent day until I found out what went wrong...

[disturbed1]

I just load my avi file into Avidemux, adjust the avi muxer to split at 980mb, and set the video/audio codecs to copy.