[MEncoder-users] (no subject)

[mal content]

Hello.

My friend recently sent me a quicktime movie file from his
university. I'm supposed to be doing the audio soundtrack for
him but I can't get his file to open in anything on my G4.

I've been trying various incantations to convert the file on my
BSD desktop machine but nothing really seems to work. I can
sometimes get output that's watchable on the BSD desktop,
but when copied to my PPC G4, it doesn't work at all.
I get various strange results such as a completely blank,
white movie (Quicktime speak for 'I don't know what this
file is) or an empty, black window with extremely strange
proportions. MplayerOSX usually gives up on the files
entirely and refuses to play them.

I've tried this:

$ mencoder attemp3.Copy2.mov -o attemp3.Copy2.avi -ovc lavc -of avi -nosound

The resulting file plays properly on the BSD desktop but not
on the G4, in mplayer or Quicktime Player.

The file before conversion:

$ file attemp3.Copy2.mov
attemp3.Copy2.mov: Apple QuickTime movie (modified)
$ mplayer -identify attemp3.Copy2.mov
QuickTime/MOV file format detected.
--------------
MOV track #0: 183 chunks, 406 samples
ID_AUDIO_ID=0
Audio bits: 16  chans: 2  rate: 44100
Audio extra header: len=80  fcc=0x77617665
MOV: Found alac atom (36)!
MOV: Found unknown audio atom Fourcc: alac
--------------
MOV track #1: 942 chunks, 942 samples
ID_VIDEO_ID=1
Image size: 720 x 576 (24 bpp)
Display size: 720 x 576
Fourcc: AVRn  Codec: 'Avid ABVB NuVista'
--------------
MOV: longest streams: A: #0 (406 samples)  V: #1 (942 samples)
VIDEO:  [AVRn]  720x576  24bpp  25.000 fps    0.0 kbps ( 0.0 kbyte/s)
==========================================================================
Opening audio decoder: [ffmpeg] FFmpeg/libavcodec audio decoders
AUDIO: 44100 Hz, 2 ch, s16le, 0.0 kbit/0.00% (ratio: 0->176400)
Selected audio codec: [ffalac] afm:ffmpeg (FFmpeg ALAC audio decoder)
==========================================================================
ID_FILENAME=attemp3.Copy2.mov
ID_VIDEO_FORMAT=AVRn
ID_VIDEO_BITRATE=0
ID_VIDEO_WIDTH=720
ID_VIDEO_HEIGHT=576
ID_VIDEO_FPS=25.000
ID_VIDEO_ASPECT=0.0000
ID_AUDIO_CODEC=ffalac
ID_AUDIO_FORMAT=alac
ID_AUDIO_BITRATE=0
ID_AUDIO_RATE=44100
ID_AUDIO_NCH=2
ID_LENGTH=37

Can anybody suggest how I can get this file into a usable format? I
would just like a plain MPEG or AVI format, 320x240.

My (mostly uneducated) guess is that there's a lot of crap left in the
stream by the Avid software that he's using and this is causing problems
for either mplayer or Quicktime. One method would be to strip all the
video down to some appropriately raw format and re-encode it to some
clean, open format. Unfortunately, this is beyond my range of expertise,
I'm a musician, not a video editor...

Any help would be appreciated.