[MEncoder-users] Using mplayer/mencoder to detect broken media...

[Joe Emenaker]

Probably more of a mplayer question, but I like to live life on the 
edge, so I'm posting it to the mencoder list (and also because it's the 
list I follow daily).

I have an ext3 partition with a lot of avi's/mov's/avf's/wmv's... and it 
had a nasty filesystem corruption last night... with lots of problems 
which were "fixed" in the sense that the filesystem is now coherent 
again, but the data in some or many of the videos is now corrupt.

I'd *like* to avoid watching every frame of each one for tiny glitches. 
I'd rather run a script that will check them all for me.

Googling turned up the prospect of doing: "mplayer -vo null -ao null 
-speed <speed> <file>", but this outputs a lot of text that must be 
looked through for errors. What I'm after is a command-line that will 
output nothing *unless* there is some kind of demuxer/decoder error or 
warning. Then, I can toss the file into a "suspected good" or "suspected 
bad" folder, depending upon whether or not any text was produced by mplayer.

What I've come up with so far is this:
mplayer -benchmark -nosound -vo null -msglevel all=2:lirc=-1:input=0 
hosed.avi

"-benchmark" and "-nosound" just tells mplayer to go as fast as it can, 
which seems a better option, to me, than "-speed".
For the message levels: "all=2" gets rid of a lot of the boilerplate like:
> Playing hosed.avi.
> AVI file format detected.
> VIDEO:  [XVID]  320x240  24bpp  25.000 fps  1302.7 kbps (159.0 kbyte/s)
> ...
"lirc=-1" gets rid of "Failed to open LIRC support. You will not be able 
to use your remote control."
"input=0" gets rid of "Can't open joystick device /dev/input/js0: No 
such file or directory" and "Can't init input joystick"

So, what I'm left with is 6 lines reading:
> MPlayer dev-SVN-rUNKNOWN-4.1.2 (C) 2000-2007 MPlayer Team
> CPU: AMD Athlon(tm)  (Family: 6, Model: 10, Stepping: 0)
> CPUflags:  MMX: 1 MMX2: 1 3DNow: 1 3DNow2: 1 SSE: 1 SSE2: 0
> Compiled with runtime CPU detection.
> mplayer: could not connect to socket
> mplayer: No such file or directory
Strangely, "cpudetect=-1" and/or "global=-1" and/or "cplayer=-1" all 
fail to eliminate any of these six lines.

Before I go an try *every* message type listed in "-msglevel help", does 
anybody know, off the top of their head, what I should use?

- Joe