[MPlayer-users] How to identify missing video-codec?

[Jeff Clagg]

On Tue, Apr 18, 2006 at 07:00:58PM -0500, Ivan Kowalenko wrote:

> This is probably your problem. I don't think Apple started using H. 
> 264 in QuickTime until mid 2005. As such, there was no real call for  
> H.264 in the main stream, and its development was kind of ignored for  
> the time being.

All untrue. Do you seriously imagine the entire world was watching Apple
to decide whether or not to deploy a new video codec?

> Anyway, your version of MPlayer is way out of date, and it doesn't  
> know what to do with H.264 video. You should be warned that the  
> version of H.264 produced in open source (known as x264) isn't  
> totally up to snuff.

Oh, it's not? Would you rather people use Apple's encoder, which is
10-50 times slower? And in what way is x264 not up to snuff, exactly?

> The FFMPEG H.264 decoder is pretty good, though,  
> but not perfect. Playing a two and a half minute long trailer (Apple  
> produced, H.264, 480p at 2.35:1), MPlayer produced a lot of "Error  
> while decoding frame!" messages, mostly because all of H.264 hasn't  
> been fully reverse engineered.

Lately, these usually turn out to be demuxing issues. Nico has already
replied to the "reverse engineering" idea.

> Your experience might be better, since  
> you're using an x86 CPU and might be able to nab some QuickTime DLLs,  
> but using FFmpeg, we'll see.

In most respects, Apple's decoder really sucks compared to libavcodec's:
it's something like baseline + 1 b-frame iirc. I wouldn't recommend it
to anyone using x86.