Help/info on IV50 "Indeo Video 5" codec....

[petruccibanez]

Hey guys, it's my first post. Well I ran into another .Avi file with the horrible Indeo Video 5 codec and of course have problems with it on Mac OSX. I know the quicktime codec for mac is only used in Classic and how VLC and pretty much everything else can't play the video. Well I just noticed something...

MPlayer plays them!

Of course I'm pretty pumped up to have an answer for these headache video files as far as playback. But I still run into the other problem; I can't encode the video to another format, leaving it ONLY playable by MPlayer. So my question is this: Is there a video encoding program that I can use that has a "decode with MPlayer" option, because I know there's always the "decode with quicktime" option for most and programs like VisualHub have that in addition to decoding with ffmpeg AND VLC (really cool!). It seems, in theory, that if it plays in MPlayer, and if you could decode with MPlayer, that you could encode to other formats. I'm not a real techie by any means but it seems reasonable. Anybody have any ideas or answers??

[jpschuck]

ffmpeg AND VLC (really cool!). It seems, in theory, that if it plays in MPlayer, and if you could decode with MPlayer, that you could encode to other formats. I'm not a real techie by any means but it seems reasonable. Anybody have any ideas or answers??

I usually to this using MPlayer in command line interface then ffmpegX.

A - Converting the video track to a raw video file
1/ Locate Mplayer for OS X
2/ Right-click (or control-click) on the application and choose "show package content"
3/ Go to Contents > Resources > External Binaries
4/ Choose the right mplayer for your platform (mplayer_intel for Intel based Macs ; mplayer_ppc for G4 or G5 : mplayer_noaltivec for G3)
5/ Right-click (or control-click) once more on the element and choose "show package content"
6/ This time, go to Contents > MacOS ; you will see the mplayer binary that we will use for the conversion.
7/ Open a terminal window and drop on it the mplayer binary that you found step 6
8/ Drop the video file you want to convert
9/ Type "-ao pcm -vo yuv4mpeg" folllowed by a space
10/ Type "-fps" followed by a space, then type the framerate number of your video (usually 23.976 , 25 or 29.97 ; mplayer is international : it doesn't matter if you use stops or commas) ; this step is not mandatory but can prevent some synchronization issues in case of variable framerate videos
11/ Your final command should look something like this

/Applications/MPlayer\ OSX\ PPC.app/Contents/Resources/External_Binaries/mplayer_intel.app/Contents/MacOS/mplayer -ao pcm -vo yuv4mpeg -fps 23.976

11/ Hit return and wait for the conversion to succeed. Conversion is pretty fast as it just involves a decompression process (no recompression)
12/ Your output files (xxx.yuv and yyy.wav) are in your home folder. Check with mplayer if those files are readable (please note that raw .yuv files don't have any index so you can't jump to any part of the movie)


B - Converting the raw file and muxing
1/ Simply use ffmpegX to convert the .yuv file to .avi and any tool to convert the wav file to mp3. Keep that in mind :
- you may have to manually set the size (in pixels) of your output (usually the same as the input, you can check this with RealPlayer or in the Terminal window during step A)
- you may have to manually set the fps of your output (usually the same as the input)
- you may have to manually set the bitrate of your video
- you have to disable audio conversion (of course : the .yuv file is a video only file)
- the progress bar in ffmpegX won't reflect the actual progression

2/ Multiplex the audio and video part with ffmpegX, D-Vision, or any other tool.

[petruccibanez]

Amazing. Thanks! I definitely wouldn't have figured all of that out simply because I'm not comfortable using command line, but you stated it very clearly and easy-to-understand. I'm gonna try this out. I was gonna just resort to using iShowU to just capture the image and sound of the mplayer playing the file but it's good to know that there is a way, although kind of involved, to work with these files. Let's just hope people will just stop using this codec to encode their media

Thanks again, jpschuck!

[pixel zombie]

if you have classic you can load the codec into OS9 and then save the avi as a mov file and convert from there...