Cannot play mp4... mostly

[calcmandan]

Enjoying a fresh new ivy bridge system76 laptop.

Installed kubuntu desktop and began configuring away. Installed everything i could imagine, including minitube.

Fantastic little app except i noticed it crashing on some videos. I'd mark to download the vids and they're mp4. I tried playing them and nothing. Converted them to ogg, no problem.

So it's not the source, but my codecs. So I downloaded everything i could think of.

kubuntu-restricted-extras
gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly
vlc
libdvdread4
ran /usr/share/doc/libdvdread4/install-css.sh
gsteamer0.10-ffmpeg
gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg

vlc will play the mp4 but minitube won't. so... not sure where to go from here.

one more thing, i removed the gstreamer registry file in hopes the newly generated file would work...

[dequire]

Quick thought - Do the mp4's play in Dragon Player and/or KMPlayer?

[calcmandan]

Quick thought - Do the mp4's play in Dragon Player and/or KMPlayer?

No with dragon, yes with kmplayer, no with movie player, yes with vlc

[weha]

Maybe install the medibuntu repo http://packages.medibuntu.org/
They have the most up-to-date codecs (libavcodec etc.)

[calcmandan]

Maybe install the medibuntu repo http://packages.medibuntu.org/
They have the most up-to-date codecs (libavcodec etc.)

Installed the libav tools. Tried playing again.

Here's the output on the command line


blablabla@laptop:~/Videos$ dragon Mahler\ Symphony\ No.\ 8\ Part\ I\ -\ Part\ 2\ of\ 3.mp4
QPainter::begin: Paint device returned engine == 0, type: 2
QPainter::begin: Paint device returned engine == 0, type: 2
QPainter::begin: Paint device returned engine == 0, type: 2
Setting new source
New source: QUrl( "file:///home/blablabla/Videos/Mahler Symphony No. 8 Part I - Part 2 of 3.mp4" )
Transitioning to state "playing"
State change
Moving from "null" 0 to "ready" 1
Transitioning to state "playing"
QPainter::begin: Paint device returned engine == 0, type: 2
QPainter::begin: Paint device returned engine == 0, type: 2
QPainter::begin: Paint device returned engine == 0, type: 2
Stream changed to file:///home/blablabla/Videos/Mahler%20Symphony%20No.%208%20Part%20I%20-%20Part%202%20of%203.mp4
QPainter::begin: Paint device returned engine == 0, type: 2

[SteveRiley]

MP4 is a container. An MP4 file contains two streams: encoded video and encoded audio. MP4 allows for a variety of both. Let's take a look at what's inside one of those suspicious files:

avprobe -show_format -show_streams [i]/path/to/file[/i].mp4

[perspectoff]

faac and faad?

A lot of mp4 content contains Apple's AAC audio codecs. Although VLC and MPlayer (and therefore kmplayer) have the AAC decoder built-in, other video players do not.

Installing the faad package gave me AAC decoding capability (and then faac gave me AAC encoding capability).

Also, most MP4 video content uses H264/X264 video content these days (instead of XVID, for example), so you'll need the X264 video codec as well. I can't remember exactly what I used to get that codec -- there is a library libx264-120 that should take care of it, I think.

While you're at it, why not install ffmpeg and mencoder to give yourself conversion capabilities?

[SteveRiley]

You can get x264 from LibAV, but you need to override the dependency resolver to use the "extra" version of the libavcodec package.