[MPlayer-users] Re: portable video format?

[Steve Kleene]

On 11 Feb 2007 19:52:17 -0500, I wrote

> I've been trying with mencoder 1.0-rc1-4.1.2 to make a widely compatible
> video for my web site and have struck out.
> ...
> Is their some bulletproof way to encode a video so that it will play on most
> XP machines?

I received many helpful suggestions, tested quite a few of them, and now
report some of the results.  Each output file was tested on three XP
machines.  On each machine I tried to play the file with recent versions of
Media Player (WMP), Real Player (RP), or Quicktime (QT).  I also tried to
play them within Movie Maker (MM) and PowerPoint (PP).  All of the files
played fine with mplayer.

See the bottom of the message for the exact command lines I used.  Tests 1a
and 1b were the only ones that worked on all three XP machines and all four
of WMP, RP, MM, and PP.  They also played, but with some freezing, in QT.
I won't list the nine other command lines I used that failed miserably or
only worked on a subset of the XP machines.  Unless someone wants to see
them, that is.

On Mon, 12 Feb 2007 01:59:46 -0800, RC <rcooley at spamcop.net> wrote:

> If it's video-only, you need to use -of rawvideo.

It was video-only.  That's test1a, which worked.

On Mon, 12 Feb 2007 13:15:09 -0400, Giacomo Comes <comes at naic.edu> [wrote
suggesting the test1b command line, which also worked]. 

Finally, on Mon, 12 Feb 2007 19:45:29 +0100, Guillaume POIRIER
<poirierg at gmail.com> wrote:

> the creation of MP4 that can be decoded by QuickTime is documented in
> MPlayer documentation:
> http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/menc-feat-quicktime-7.html

With that, I did succeed in getting a file that QT played on all three XP
machines.  None of the other players would play it.  I didn't succeed with
MPEG-4 and ffourcc XVID or DIVX.  I forgot to try the msmpeg4v2 codec.

Even with the files that played under XP, I encountered some insanities.
MM and PP often decided the videos were of shorter duration than they really
were, and so they would play a part and stop short.  On a couple of
occasions, I made a simple copy of a file that played correctly, and the copy
did not play correctly.  I have no idea what was going on there.

I also didn't do very well trying to concatenate three videos into one
playable video.  For MP, I could just cat the files together and they would
play through.  I tried to concatenate them in mencoder with -forceidx and got
an unusable result (super-high contrast).  I found no way to concatenate the
QT files with a playable result.  Maybe mpeg4ip has a way to do this.

My videos were taken in a lab with a black-and-white camera.  I didn't find a
way to take advantage of having grayscale to reduce the file size.  I used
the lavc option "gray", but that didn't affect the size of the output file.

The successful command lines:

test1a
  mencoder /dev/dvd -nosound -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg1video \
    -of rawvideo -o test1a.mpg

test1b
  mencoder /dev/dvd -nosound -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg1video \
    -of lavf -lavfopts format=mpg:i_certify_that_my_video_stream_does_not_use_b_frames \
    -o test1b.mpg

and the Quicktime method at the URL shown above.

Thanks to everyone for helping me to make some progress.