[MPlayer-users] incorrect handling of palettized video?

[Roberto Togni]

On Sat, 04 Mar 2006 19:27:18 -0500
Edwin Olson <eolson at mit.edu> wrote:

> (Version MPlayer 1.0pre7try2-3.2.3 )
> 
> I have a number of MSRLE videos which use frequent palette changes, but 
> it appears that mplayer doesn't properly change the palette.  This 
> problem appears to be related to several other postings.
> 
> The MSRLE codec comes from libavcodec, and the libavcodec avi parser 
> appears to properly parse 00pc chunks from the AVI stream, but it 
> appears that mplayer (libmp) has its own avi parser (?) that doesn't.  
> (Aside: does anyone know of a program that uses the libavcodec avi parser?)

Palette change in AVI is totally unsupported in MPlayer now, only
palette from BITMAPINFOHEADER is supported.

libavformat parser is used by ffplay and ffmpeg, you can also use it in
MPlayer by specifying -demuxer lavf (-demuxer 35 wit pre7)

> 
> An example AVI file (460KB) is here:
> 
> http://www.blisstonia.com/eolson/msrle_pal.avi
> 
> It plays correctly on Windows (using WMP10), but incorrectly on mplayer 
> (you should see a light blue drawing with yellow text on a black 
> background). Specifically, mplayer's palette seems to be random junk, 
> and it appears that 00pc chunks are being passed to the decoder as 
> though they were 00dc chunks (which results in the codec complaining 
> about illegally formatted chunks as well as garbage in the displayed video.)
> 
> Movies in which the palette is included in the BITMAPHEADER section of 
> 'strf' appear to be played correctly, provided there are no other 
> palette changes.
> 
> Any ideas? Thanks-

I get the same behaviour with all players i tested (MPlayer cvs,
ffplay, xine): wrong colors and random colored lines at the bottom.
I also get an error message from msrle decoder
[msrle @ 0x8354028] MS RLE: stream ptr just went out of bounds (1)
but i still have to look into that.

Ciao,
 Roberto