mplayer has a problem with avi's captured from DV camcorders?

clausawits · 11-09-2004, 01:37 PM

Hello, I have a series of videos that I captured via firewire and a Windows program. They are saved as "raw" avi's and quite large to try to maintain quality (I want to do some data analysis, since they are videos of a machine in action).

I can run them in Windows machines without problems with regular old Media Player, but I wanted to export a sequence of frames to .pngs and I thought mplayer (run on an up-to-date Fedora Core 2) would be the ticket.

I was quite surprised to have mplayer crap out on me complaining:

Code:

Playing /mnt/cdrom/jyc.AVI.
Cache fill:  9.18% (770048 bytes)    AVI file format detected.
AVI_NI: No video stream found.

Anybody know what's going on? Googling doesn't seem to have any answers (at least in a language that I can understand, anyway).. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&l...22&btnG=Search

One of the google links even has someone asking the same question as I am, it seems... but they get no answer.. :/

thanks for any help!

clausawits · 11-09-2004, 03:14 PM

After more mucking through the internet, I've finally found this thread that seems to address the issue.
http://www1.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/m...st/019561.html

The short version of the answer seems to be that it is in some "type-1 dv file" format that mplayer hasn't yet added support for (or at least that was the case in 2002...)

edit: now if I could only figure out how to use dvgrab to convert it.. I tried
cat jyd.AVI | dvgrab --stdin test
but that just resulted in jibberish...

argh..

kevinatkins · 11-09-2004, 06:45 PM

Hi,

yes, from memory there are two types of dv avi - type 1 and type 2; one of which has sound multiplexed in and one without... i think, don't quote me on this...

anyway, the only thing i can suggest is to try transcode, which should handle the job but do make *sure* that you satisfy dependencies for the file type you want to work with, and explicitly enable during compile (at least, that's been my experience..)

also try avidemux..

clausawits · 11-13-2004, 10:41 AM

well, I've tried transcode, and have been confused by it.. haven't found success with it.

on this page, http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/f...ewmonth=200309
I found this question: "Is there an application to convert dv1 or dv2 to raw dv"
which had the answer of:
"Transcode:

transcode -i inputfile -x dv -o outputfile -y dvraw"

I did a yum install transcode with Fedora Core 2, and then executed the command above (with appropriate replacements for "inputfile" and "output file".. the resulting file was played by mplayer, but was just a black screen.

I checked the man page for transcode and was absolutely swamped by the huge amount of options, most of which were beyond my understanding (I'm rather ignorant regarding video file formats). Hunting in the dark, I tried the option -x dvraw but that didn't work (checked the man page again, and saw that dvraw is only available as an output format.. :/ (seems strange to me..)

Then, I tried -x dv -y divx4 since maybe mplayer wasn't liking whatever dvraw format was coming out of transcode. That time, I got the answer of:
"[import_dv.so] tcextract -x dv -i "secondofficial6.AVI" -d 0 | tcdecode -x dv -y rgb -d 0 -Q 5
AVILIB: error - DV AVI Type 1 no supported"
(this same error may have occured the first time I tried to run transcode, but if so, the messages of:
"Impossible frequency??0-003950], 10.40 fps, EMT: 0:02:38, ( 0| 0| 9)
Impossible frequency??0-003951], 10.40 fps, EMT: 0:02:38, ( 0| 0| 9)
encoding frames [000000-003952], 10.40 fps, EMT: 0:02:38, ( 0| 0| 9)"
quickly scrolled it off the screen.)

yeargh.. this sucks. I tend to have this impression of Linux as a "swiss army knife" kind of thing that can do anything, then I run into something that seems pretty simple that it can't do, even though other systems don't even blink at it.. ahh well.. I guess that's the Cathedral and the Bazaar..