H.264 (avc1) playback problems

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Level 2

185 points

H.264 (avc1) playback problems

I have a series of videos that I am trying to watch in quicktime.

When I load the video, and hit cmd+i, I am told that the format is "H.264, 512 x 384, Millions AAC, Stereo (L R), 22.050 kHz." Upon hitting play, I get an initial green screen, a few seconds of sound and then Quicktime crashes.

VLC, on the other hand, plays this correcty and reports that the video stream is "avc1." On my windows machine I can play this file with the ffdshow decoder.

Anyone have any ideas how to get this working in quicktime? I want this going in Front Row.

Thanks to all.

15" Mac Book Pro, Mac OS X (10.4.6)

Posted on May 2, 2006 3:30 PM

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Answer 1

TAV

Level 3

880 points

May 2, 2006 4:29 PM in response to ViolentGreen

I know this isn't really an answer, but I share your pain:

I've come across that issue a few times, primarily posting on a site where the PC folks fiddle around with daily builds of x264 variants and various containers and use us Mac people out as testers.

Oddly enough, I just grabbed a video test file that is AVC1 today and it plays fine in both QT (shows as a H.264 file) and VLC (shows the stream as AVC1). Other times, no joy.

I have yet to find anything that allows QT to handle some of these files, so rather than fight it, I just try and convert them to using the VLC export wizard, ffmpegX or iSquint or other.

On that note, I like to hear suggestions outside of re-encoding as well.

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Answer 2

ViolentGreen Author

Level 2

185 points

Jun 10, 2006 9:53 AM in response to TAV

Thanks for the answer. I have had some luck with transcoding.

At some point, I was able to get a xvid codec working through quicktime. I was able to extract ffmpeg from right clicking ffmpegX and chosing "Show Package contents." I placed it my my path and created the following script below.

file="$1"
newfile="$2"
format"=mp4"

ffmpeg -i "${file}" \
-y \
-f ${format} \
-vcodec xvid \
-threads 3 \
-deinterlace \
-bf 2 \
-an \
-pass 1 \
"${newfile}"

ffmpeg -i "${file}" \
-y \
-f ${format} \
-vcodec xvid \
-threads 3 \
-deinterlace \
-bf 2 \
-ar 44100 \
-ab 128 \
-pass 2 \
-pass 1 \
"${newfile}"

You should be able to call it with two parameters: the original file as the first and the new "transcoded" file as the second. I could see no noticible video degredation between the h.264 and the xvid.

Please note that this isn't the actual script that I used but a simplified version. If it doesn't work, let me know and I'll try to run it.

12 1GH PB G4

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