[MPlayer-users] "FATAL: Cannot initialize video driver" when running mencoder with -ovc lavc

[Reimar Döffinger]

On 1 Mar 2012, at 17:16, The Wanderer <wanderer at fastmail.fm> wrote:
> On 02/29/2012 01:57 PM, Reimar Döffinger wrote:
> 
>> On 29 Feb 2012, at 05:57, The Wanderer <wanderer at fastmail.fm> wrote:
>>> On 02/28/2012 02:33 PM, Reimar Döffinger wrote:
> 
>>>> Should be fixed now, that was just a check in MPlayer that had no reason
>>>> to exist at all, needed only be removed.
>>> Yep, seems to work fine now.
>>> Thanks for the fix; it makes sense based on what I could figure out of the
>>> code, but I haven't been following the details of either MPlayer or FFmpeg
>>> development for some time now.
>>> D'you happen to know when the switch that made this start failing took
>>> place? I had a quick look, but I couldn't spot an obviously relevant commit
>>> in the logs.
>> It's not one, it is one per codec. Look for commit messages like "switch to
>> encode2".
> 
> I *did*. The most recent occurrence of 'encode2' in the MPlayer 'svn log'
> output, prior to the one from the commit that fixed this, is from a commit by
> Diego in 2009.

The issue depended on the chosen FFmpeg encoder, and you need to look at the FFmpeg log.

> Also, I'm now getting a different error when trying to encode in to ffv1 with
> vpass=3, which at a glance looks like it might be related:
> 
> ====
> videocodec: libavcodec (720x480 fourcc=31564646 [FFV1])
> [VE_LAVC] High quality encoding selected (non-realtime)!
> Assertion s->version>=2 failed at libavcodec/ffv1.c:994
> Aborted
> ====
> 
> Do I need to report that to one of the two libav* projects (and isn't *that* a
> headache), or is it likely to be due to a problem on the MPlayer side of things?

I think you/MPlayer selected a pixel format to encode that only version 2 of the FFV1 format can support, but you haven't set the right options to make it use that version 2.