[MPlayer-users] playing quicktime with mplayer (animatrix)

[Brett Kosinski]

> after RTFM, here's a bug report.
>
> symptom: the movie starts to play, but only the first image is 
> displayed, it doesn't do anything afterwards. the movei in question is 
> THE_SECOND_RENAISSANCE_1_large.mov downloadable from 
> http://whatisthematrix.warnerbros.com/index_anime.html

Yes, this is definitely a known bug.  Someone else mentioned a patch you 
can use to get the movie to play, so start there.

However, there is one other problem... the large and small versions of the
Animatrix1 (NOT the medium one!)  splits the audio into two parts, with
aid 1 and 2.  BUT, mplayer only knows how to play one track at a time.  
In particular, it always selects the largest audio and video track.  As a
result, the first chunk of audio, about 10 seconds worth, won't get
played, and the audio sync for the movie will be off ~10 seconds.

So, the easiest solution is this (assuming you really want to watch the 
large version :):  Grab the medium version of the animatrix1 and dump the 
audio to wave as follows:

mplayer -vo null -vc null -ao pcm -aofile soundtrack.wav medium.mov

Then, use the wav file as the sound track for the large version as 
follows:

mplayer -audiofile soundtrack.wav large.mov

Note that you'll have to wait a while in both cases... first, for it to 
decode, then for mplayer to scan the WAV. :)

Of course, if you don't care about watching the medium one, just do 
that... it should work quite nicely with A'rpi's patch.

Brett.