This page last modified: Oct 24 2007
title:Hints about MPlayer codecs and streaming problems keywords:quicktime,stream,video,hang,pause,no,image,wmv,mov,codec,dll description:Hints about MPlayer especially streaming Quicktime video. Table of contents ----------------- Additional codecs Hints for streaming settings Additional codecs ----------------- Mplayer was willing to play a .wmv with the base installation via yum (rpm) from Livna with Fedora. However, it claimed not to be able to find a certain codec that it wanted for the .wmv file. 1) Go to the Mplayer download page: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/dload.html 2) Scroll down to the "Binary Codec Packages" section. Get the Linux codec file http://www3.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/essential-20071007.tar.bz2 I su'd to root and used wget: wget http://www3.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/essential-20071007.tar.bz2 3) Decompress bzip2 -d essential-20071007.tar.bz2 4) Untar tar -xvf essential-20071007.tar 5) cd into the new directory, and read the README, move the files. cd essential-20071007 cat README mv * /usr/lib/codecs/ Now when I run mplayer (as a non-root user of course) the .wmv plays with no messages about codecs that Mplayer can't find. The image quality was the same when Mplayer couldn't find the codec and when it could, so I guess whatever substitute codec was originally used was ok. None the less, this hint might help in some cases. The download above includes a large number of codecs, so I now may be able to play Real media files too (which I seem to remember don't play on my machine). Hints for streaming settings ---------------------------- These settings seem to help make streaming video and sound smoother: -autosync 30 -framedrop mplayer rtsp://example.com/info.sdp -autosync 30 -framedrop This applies to mplayer SVN-r23545 mplayer-1.0-0.73.20070612svn.lvn6 under Fedora Core 6. If when using MPlayer to view streaming Quicktime your session hangs at these lines: Initiated "audio/MPEG4-GENERIC" RTP subsession on port 33104 Initiated "video/H264" RTP subsession on port 33106 then you almost certainly have a firewall issue. The quick way I diagnosed this problem was to temporarily disable my firewall. That this was not a "hard" hang in that ^C was able to kill mplayer. This is a terminal session from an example MPlayer: [zeus ~]$ mplayer rtsp://example.com/info.sdp MPlayer SVN-r23545 rpm.livna.org (C) 2000-2007 MPlayer Team CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 2.40GHz (Family: 15, Model: 2, Stepping: 9) CPUflags: MMX: 1 MMX2: 1 3DNow: 0 3DNow2: 0 SSE: 1 SSE2: 1 Compiled with runtime CPU detection. mplayer: could not connect to socket mplayer: No such file or directory Failed to open LIRC support. You will not be able to use your remote control. Playing rtsp://example.com/info.sdp. Resolving example.com for AF_INET6... Couldn't resolve name for AF_INET6: example.com Resolving example.com for AF_INET... Connecting to server example.com[208.77.188.166]: 554... A single media stream only is supported atm. rtsp_session: unsupported RTSP server. Server type is 'DSS/5.5.5 (Build/489.16; Platform/Linux; Release/Darwin; state/beta; )'. STREAM_LIVE555, URL: rtsp://example.com/info.sdp Stream not seekable! file format detected. Initiated "audio/MPEG4-GENERIC" RTP subsession on port 33104 Initiated "video/H264" RTP subsession on port 33106 demux_rtp: Guessed the video frame rate as 6 frames-per-second. (If this is wrong, use the "-fps <frame-rate>" option instead.) VIDEO: [H264] 0x0 0bpp 6.000 fps 0.0 kbps ( 0.0 kbyte/s) ========================================================================== Opening video decoder: [ffmpeg] FFmpeg's libavcodec codec family Selected video codec: [ffh264] vfm: ffmpeg (FFmpeg H.264) ========================================================================== ========================================================================== Opening audio decoder: [faad] AAC (MPEG2/4 Advanced Audio Coding) FAAD: compressed input bitrate missing, assuming 128kbit/s! AUDIO: 44100 Hz, 2 ch, s16le, 128.0 kbit/9.07% (ratio: 16000->176400) Selected audio codec: [faad] afm: faad (FAAD AAC (MPEG-2/MPEG-4 Audio) decoder) ========================================================================== AO: [alsa] 48000Hz 2ch s16le (2 bytes per sample) Starting playback... [h264 @ 0x8788f60]warning: first frame is no keyframe VDec: vo config request - 160 x 120 (preferred colorspace: Planar YV12) VDec: using Planar YV12 as output csp (no 0) Movie-Aspect is undefined - no prescaling applied. VO: [xv] 160x120 => 160x120 Planar YV12