[MPlayer-users] mencoder and large avi files

[Fredrik Kuivinen]

On Sun, Mar 24, 2002 at 06:14:36PM -0500, Scott T. Bowden wrote:
> [Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read DOCS/bugreports.html]
> I've been working on a sort of homebrewed tivo for a while, and I recently
> decided to use mencoder in order to encode the video that I capture into
> divx4. The system this is on is not fast enough to do divx in realtime,
> and so initially, the video is encoded on the fly into avi, and then
> reencoded into divx4 afterwards. It isn't a perfect setup, but it does
> work for what I want.
> 
> Unfortunately, I've been having problems with mencoder not being able to
> recognize large AVI files. Is this a limitation of the AVI format, or is
> this a self-imposed limitation of mencoder? More importantly, what can I
> do about it? Is there a way to work around this? Or is there another
> format recognized by mencoder that isn't limited to 2GB files? I'm not
> going to be able to do on the fly encoding that is going to pump out files
> smaller than around 1.5 GB/hr, so reducing the filesize isn't much of an
> option.
> 
> Any help is appreciated,
>

AFAIK standard avi files have a 4 GB limit. There is a extension to the avi
format, called OpenDML
(http://www.matrox.com/videoweb/news/press/papers/odmlff2.htm), but it is
currently not supported by mplayer/mencoder.

I don't know how quicktime handle this though.

If you are working with large files make sure that you pass --enable-largefiles
to 'configure'.

/ Fredrik