[MEncoder-users] Unplayable flv movies

[Rich Felker]

On Wed, Aug 29, 2007 at 11:19:13PM +0100, Ade wrote:
> On Wed Aug 29 15:56 , ReimarDöffinger  
> <Reimar.Doeffinger at stud.uni-karlsruhe.de> sent:
> 
> > On Wed, Aug 29, 2007 at 04:33:44PM +0100, Ade wrote:
> > [...]
> >> If you can shed anymore light on how those two files differ it would  
> >> put my mind at ease. Also if you could point me at any analysis tools  
> >> perhaps I can look myself to save you the trouble.
> >
> > You don't need an analysis tool, a text editor will do fine. The first
> > file contained exactly the text I quoted! You managed to munge part of
> > mencoders output into the file - and it obviously isn't playable then.
> > Not to mention the security/privacy issues that would mean even if it
> > did play...
> >
> Aha, thanks Reimar. I can see where it is all going wrong now.
> 
> I have been using a daemon process to fire off the shellscript and it  
> looks as though mencoders stderr has been redirected into the output file.  
> I guess the daemon has its file handles in a twist.

Sounds like this daemon has a bug where it runs processes with no
stderr file descriptor (possibly not stdin/stdout either), so that the
first files they open become these. You should report this issue to
the maintainer/author of the daemon because it's a pretty serious bug
that can lead to all kinds of data corruption like you experienced.

Rich