[MPlayer-users] Mencoded Xvid AVIs are not playable......SOLVED!

[D Richard Felker III]

On Sat, Oct 18, 2003 at 12:09:35AM +0200, guardian at skip.cz wrote:
> [Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read DOCS/bugreports.html]
> Corey wrote:
> 
> > Without personally being able to say anything definite about your
> > encoding options, I would recommend that you use the ffdshow codec
> > package with windows. DivX 5 doesn't support nearly as many mpeg-4
> > features as libavcodec does, and can have problems decoding.
> 
> 
> Yes - thats it! When i am under windows testing (using) ffdshow codec,
> the lavc-Divx-MPEG4 videos are now playable without player-shutdown and
> without random 5-seconds-long video fragmentation. (theres a small cosmetic
> bug - in the right-bellow ((in the black picture area)) is flashing 5
> centimeters long green rectangle....but its only cosmetic defect).
> Thanks to Corey for help! (i thing, this is enlightement for us-all).
> Yes, divx is now playing under windows, but Xvid is still poorly
> playable (with any-ffdshow/xvid codec). I am newly discovered this:
> 30 sec sample (from absolute begin ((time zero)) of any VOB file) with 
> VBR lame
> audio is NOT playable (audio yes, video no).
> 30 sec sample (from same VOB file ((e.g. position beginning from 60 and 
> ending
> at 90 second)) with same parameters is playable.....strange......but 
> sample beginning
> at time zero - is unplayable.......

Recent versions of WMP have a horrible bug whereby they try to detect
MP3 files before AVI files, and thus if it finds 2 mp3 headers in the
first 64k (iirc) of the file, it assumes you have an mp3 file rather
than an avi! :(( Normally this won't happen, since video frames are
usually big, but it's much more likely if there's a long period of
solid black at the beginning of your movie. Perhaps mencoder should
work around this bug, but IMO it would be stupid since it would waste
space... MS needs to fix their crap. WMP can't play certain avi files
made by older windows software either...

Rich