[MPlayer-users] Always extracting first frame, position seems to be ignored...

[The Wanderer]

(Ugly reverse-indentation quoting fixed by hand. Please quote correctly
in the future.)

Nelson COELHO wrote:

[that the Wanderer wrote:]

>>> Hello,
>>> 
>>> I am new here, excuse if my question is out of purpose.
>>> 
>>> Well, I'm trying to get an image at a given position but MPLayer
>>> always extract first frame of the video...
>>> 
>>> Do you know what is wrong ? I'm using MPlayer 1.0pre8-3.4.2 on
>>> Windows XP 32 bits.
>> 
>> What is wrong is that you are using a highly outdated version of
>> MPlayer. There is an official release more recent than 1.0pre8; for
>> that matter, it is recommended to use the latest development
>> version rather than the official release.
> 
> Well, it is because i thought a bug was introduced in last version 
> But it is the same with MPlayer 1.0rc1-3.4.2 version...

As noted, 1.0rc1 is itself comparatively ancient (more than six months
old last time I looked, which was a while ago), and the fix if any would
be more recent than that.

>>> Here is the commandline :
>>> 
>>> mplayer -ss 00:20:00 -vo jpeg -frames 1
>>> "c:\temp\mplayerTools\avi_sample.avi"
>>> 
>>> mplayer should extract frame at 20 seconds, isn'it ? But I get
>>> the frame of the beginning of the video...
>> 
>> For a long time, there was a bug such that MPlayer would always
>> give the first frame of the movie first. If you use '-frames 2',
>> then you should get the first frame of the movie and the frame at
>> 20 seconds.

Have you tried this workaround?

>> This bug has, I seem to recall, been fixed. However, I do not think
>> that the fix was long enough ago that it would be included in the
>> most recent official release, 1.0rc1. If you want the fix (and many
>> other improvements!), you will need to obtain a copy of the latest
>> development source tree and compile it yourself. This will also
>> help you if you want to get help with MPlayer or MEncoder on these
>> mailing lists.
> 
> Well, the bug seems always here in version 1.0rc1-3.4.2, I hope it is
> fixed in laterst development source tree but I don't really know how
> compilation works on win32 environment...

I'm not intuitively familiar with it myself, since I've had no
particular reason to actually do it, but with a sufficiently up-to-date
installation of MinGW/MSYS and/or Cygwin it should be fairly close to
the same as compiling it under Linux. There exists a HOWTO on compiling
MPlayer under MinGW, but as has recently been noted hereabouts it is
apparently somewhat out of date.

-- 
       The Wanderer

Warning: Simply because I argue an issue does not mean I agree with any
side of it.

Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny.