Re: Recordings of Sam Lefler's talk last night available.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mike Tancsa" <mike_at_sentex.net>
To: "Brian K. White" <brian_at_aljex.com>; <freebsd-current_at_freebsd.org>
Sent: Thursday, March 02, 2006 11:05 PM
Subject: Re: Recordings of Sam Lefler's talk last night available.


> At 07:03 PM 02/03/2006, Brian K. White wrote:
>
>
>>I get no audio.
>>The audio is fine on the previous movies of Peters AMD64 talk on the same 
>>machine & player.
>>WinXP home, with current quicktime player.
>>I downloaded them to local files to eliminate possible browser plugin or 
>>streaming problems.
>
> I got around it by re-encoding
>
> mencoder -ovc copy -oac mp3lame -lameopts mode=1:abr:br=96 
> bafug3-sam1.mov -o p1.avi

Thanks.
That got me the audio
But now no video, as no player I have understands the codec. Even Quicktime, 
which can play the original video fine, but silently.
Stripping out just the audio would be fine but then I want the output file 
to be a lot smaller than it is. :)

I tried: quicktime, media player, winamp, divx player, PowerDVD 6 Deluxe, & 
Realplayer.
That's all the most common players for windows, and even a commercial one 
with all possible extras purchased for it, and all of them the latest 
versions and as up to date as you can get.

divx player, if you open the player first and use "file, open" instead of 
right-clicking on the file and saying "open with"
at least reports a meaningful error.
...[i don't know how to play]... Video data: FOURCC code "mp4v"

Realplayer tried to download a codec and ended by saying none was available 
for "ICM.mp4v"

All of them except divx and real played it as if it were audio only, 
including actually running the visualizer instead of a blank video window.
divx and real just quit.

I'm now playing with a commercial video transcoder program "ImTOO" I got for 
doing mpeg4 and 3gp/3pp (mpeg4 on cell phones and treo650) that can read and 
write a lot of odd formats and combinations. ... convert finished. I had it 
read the original file not the output of mencode, and left it at it's 
default settings, and it created a file that's over 30% biggger (142m in, 
199m out) and plays in all the players that can use the divx codec. (all but 
quicktime)

mplayer may play it fine, but mplayer has no gui on windows and most of my 
linux and freebsd boxes don't have much in the way of gui or multimedia 
installed or configured.
And none of them are under my desk or on my lap anyways. One freebsd box has 
x and basic mm stuff and is under a desk, in a building in a town where I 
don't happen to be at the moment.
I could have rebooted my laptop to the freebsd partition, but that crashes 
for some as yet unfound reason unless I boot in safe mode. (zd7000)
I could have popped in a knoppix cd and presumably it has mplayer or xine or 
something that would work, linux _probably_ won't trash my ntfs...

I think the video/audio format choices need a little care next time unless 
it is seen as a bonus that some people must work this hard to watch them.
Even if it is, these posts surely can't be.
(For the record, I know you would not engineer that situation deliberately 
or see it as a bonus. I'm just heading off wizecracks about not caring too 
much if it's hard to watch the video in windows :)

Brian K. White  --  brian_at_aljex.com  --  http://www.aljex.com/bkw/
+++++[>+++[>+++++>+++++++<<-]<-]>>+.>.+++++.+++++++.-.[>+<---]>++.
filePro  BBx    Linux  SCO  FreeBSD    #callahans  Satriani  Filk!