Thread: Ubuntu: Video opens in MPlayer but not in other players (inc. Avidemux)

Well, here I am with another annoyance from Ubuntu! As much as I love this OS, some of the rough edges get to me sometimes.

I'm running 8.04. I'm having a problem where an mpeg file opens fine in MPlayer, but not in any other player. VLC opens just the sound, and Avidemux just plain says "could not open file"

What I don't get is, how come MPlayer can handle it fine? I was under the impression that codecs were shared, so if MPlayer can handle it, so should all other tools that load video.

Here is relevant the output when running avidemux from the command line:

Code:

Cannot identify <filename>.mpeg as mpeg (4/6)
Cannot identify as H264 ES (2/50)

 unrecognized file detected...
.RMF (464D522E)
 (12000000)

*time goes by...*

Oh I can see now - when I look at the file properties, it says the codec is Real Video 4.0

This is frustrating, because I used to be able to convert and play with real media without any problems in the past. It might have been with 7.10 though, and it might have over-written it after updating to 8.04 (grumble).

My comment about MPlayer handling it fine still stands, though... if I didn't have the right codec installed, shouldn't it consistently just not play?

Oh yeah almost forgot. I just re-installed ffmpeg from medibuntu (to the best of my knowledge), which should have the non-crippled version. Here is some sample output:

Code:

ffmpeg -i 80scream.mpeg 
FFmpeg version SVN-rUNKNOWN, Copyright (c) 2000-2007 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
  configuration: --enable-gpl --enable-pp --enable-swscaler --enable-pthreads --enable-libvorbis --enable-libtheora --enable-libogg --enable-libgsm --enable-dc1394 --disable-debug --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libfaadbin --enable-libfaad --enable-libfaac --enable-xvid --enable-x264 --enable-liba52 --enable-amr_nb --enable-amr_wb --enable-shared --prefix=/usr
  libavutil version: 1d.49.3.0
  libavcodec version: 1d.51.38.0
  libavformat version: 1d.51.10.0
  built on Mar 17 2009 21:11:10, gcc: 4.2.4 (Ubuntu 4.2.4-1ubuntu3)
[NULL @ 0x7f4dc786a8d0]Unsupported video codec
Input #0, rm, from '80scream.mpeg':
  Duration: 00:10:40.8, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 935 kb/s
  Stream #0.0: Video: RV40 / 0x30345652, 720x576, 832 kb/s, 12.00 fps(r)
  Stream #0.1: Audio: cook, 44100 Hz, stereo, 96 kb/s
  Stream #0.2: Data: 0x0000
Must supply at least one output file

(don't let the "mpeg" fool you - it's really a RM file)

Anyway, it can clearly SEE what the file is all about, but somehow decides that it's an unsupported codec. What the hell?

You need the codec for RealVideo

Add the medibuntu repository
simplest way is to copy & paste this into a terminal

Code:

sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/`lsb_release -cs`.list --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list && sudo apt-get -q update && sudo apt-get --yes -q --allow-unauthenticated install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get -q update

If you're using 32bit, then

Code:

sudo apt-get install w32codecs

If you're using 64bit, then

Code:

sudo apt-get install w64codecs

w64codecs is already the newest version.



I'm sure all codecs are already there, though. After all, it plays on mplayer.

Here we go. After some research, it appears that I'm missing the ffrv40 decoder...

Code:

mplayer -vc help | grep rv40
rv40        realvid   working   Linux RealPlayer 9 RV40 decoder  [drv4.so.6.0]
rv40win     realvid   working   Win32 RealPlayer 9 RV40 decoder  [drv43260.dll]
rv40mac     realvid   working   Mac OS X RealPlayer 9 RV40 decoder  [drvc.bundle/Contents/MacOS/drvc]

Comparable output from others for whom this is working has an additional line:

Code:

ffrv40      ffmpeg    working   FFmpeg RV40  [rv40]

So the question really becomes, "what do I need to do to install that?" (or, "what do I need to do to get ffmpeg to pull its head out of its ass and notice that there are other codecs installed that can read the format just fine?")

I may need to build ffmpeg from scratch, but I'd be shocked if that can't be avoided - you'd think the medibuntu version would come with stuff people care about when switching to medibuntu.