[COLUG] Geeks and Ducks

[Matthew W. Miller]

On Thu, Jul 01, 2004 at 09:28:14PM -0400, Rob Funk wrote:
>Jess Balint wrote:
>> Video in Microsoft AVI format. Quite interesting.... is this an open
>> format? Couldn't seem to view it with Kaffeine.
>As I recall, the xanim has been able to play at least some AVIs just about 
>forever, with no binary modules required.

Depends what codec the audio/video was encoded in.

>Try mplayer, though it may require downloading binary Windows codecs.

Depends what codec the audio/video was encoded in. :)

MPlayer is able to play most 'DivX' (MPEG-4 video + MPEG-1 Layer III
audio) movies, as well as most 'MP4' (Quicktime in drag, with MPEG-4
video + AAC audio).  When you get into esoteric WMV and Quicktime codecs
is when you start running into problems.

In this case, the video is MJPEG, so MPlayer is able to play it using
the (LGPL) libavcodec library:

$ mplayer -idx -ao null -vo null -frames 0 -identify pics/colug-20040626/img01548.avi 2>&1 | grep -s ^ID_ | grep -sv ^ID_FILENAME= | column
ID_VIDEO_CODEC=ffmjpeg  ID_VIDEO_WIDTH=320      ID_VIDEO_ASPECT=0.0000
ID_VIDEO_FORMAT=MJPG    ID_VIDEO_HEIGHT=240     ID_LENGTH=10
ID_VIDEO_BITRATE=864688 ID_VIDEO_FPS=10.400

$ mplayer -vc help 2>&1 | grep -is ffmjpeg
ffmjpeg     ffmpeg    working   FFmpeg MJPEG decoder  [mjpeg]
ffmjpegb    ffmpeg    problems  FFmpeg MJPEG-B decoder  [mjpegb]
-- 
Matthew W. Miller <mwmiller at columbus.rr.com>      MPlayer does not suck.