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Walden's Ponderings

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Why you have more than one kind of screwdriver

cmw.osdude 120000QT77 | ‎ | 6,926 Views

This morning I had a request from a colleague to help with a video that was refusing to upload to YouTube.  The video would load and then die at 95% of processing.  How frustrating!

My first thought was to convert the video to a different format.  It was already in a WMV format, which is supported, but sometimes a conversion process will clean things up a bit.  I figured I'd try my standard:

avconv -i in.wmv -q 1 out.wmv

This will do a basic conversion with options to keep the quality high.  It usually "just works".  However, this time there was a message "Multiple frames in a packet from stream 0".  A corrupt file!

One option was to ask the originator to redo the file, but this was a live recording, so that was likely not an option and I didn't want to insite a panic.  So, I poked around a little more and tried different tools.  VLC wouldn't play the video on the file.  (Not a good sign.)  Melt (which I wrote about in a previous entry) just... well... melted.  Finally I tinkered with mencoder.

Mencoder is pretty mature.  In fact it's the first console video program that I every used.  I had to refresh myself on the recipes for encoding and stumbled across this basic one.

mencoder -oac copy -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=msmpeg4v2 in.wmv -o out.wmv

This worked like a champ.  Sure enough, as the conversion occurred I had a stream of ugly messages about the video.  Normally this would be pretty alarming because it would foretell audio sync nightmares, but since this was basically a talking slide show the audio sync was not as critical.

Once I got it uploaded I used YouTube's editor to trip a little bit off the front where the person recording was activating his slide show.  I could have done that on my end, but then I would have had to upload the whole thing again.  Might as well use the server tool.

The reason I'm sharing this is that I think it's really important to have more than one tool in your toolbox.  I haven't used mencoder for quite some time because I'd begun to favor avconv.  However, in this case, mencoder dealt with the video errors much more gracefully.  It made the difference between a finished product and really bad news.  The same way that you have more than one kind of screwdriver in your toolbox, collect different software tools, both commercial and open-source.  When one fails on you, reach for another one.  There is almost always an answer! 

If you'd care to see this particular video it's here:

 

Modified on by cmw.osdude 120000QT77
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