[MPlayer-users] Problems playing specific quicktime (mov) movie

[Matthew W. Miller]

On Sun, May 09, 2004 at 05:58:39PM -0400, Son House wrote:
>Playing the following movie doesn't work:
>http://www.thememoryhole.org/pol/bush-hitler1.mov

Yes, it's an MPEG stream stored as a "generic track" in a Quicktime
wrapper.  I've run into these before.  These are a pain to deal with,
but unless and until mplayer can extract them automatically, at least
'mplayer -v -v ...' gives you all the information you need to do so
yourself:

>MOV track #0: 1 chunks, 0 samples
>pts=2715428  scale=90000  time=30.171
>Sample     0: pts=       0  off=0x000003BA  size=5238788
                             ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^  ^^^^^^^^^^^^
>EL#0: pts=0  1st_sample=0  frames=1 (30.171s)  pts_offs=0
>Generic track - not completly understood! (id: 0)

The offset is in hexadecimal; you can use a calculator to find the 
decimal equivalent, or the 'printf' command if you have it installed:

$ printf "%d\n" 0x3ba
954

The size is in decimal, no conversions necessary.  Use dd to extract the 
MPEG stream:

$ dd bs=1 skip=954 count=5238788 if=bush-hitler1.mov of=bush-hitler1.mpg
5238788+0 records in
5238788+0 records out

The final step, of course, is to complain to whoever was responsible for 
foisting that particular file on the public in the first place. ;)
-- 
Matthew W. Miller <mwmiller at columbus.rr.com>      MPlayer does not suck.