Encoding issues

Question

I have seen a couple of posts regarding quicktime being unable to view videos saved by motion. Timelapse videos work fine, however all others fail. Using mplayer or vlc will allow the videos to be viewed. Using ffmpeg to re-encode videos created by motion (without changing codec, etc) will result in the videos being playable by quicktime. I would like to be able to view these from an OS/X system in my web browser if at all possible.

It is my guess that the issue rests within the way motion is passing encoding parameters to ffmpeg. I have tried modifying the code to allow h264 encoding as well as about 10 other formats. The result is always the same... video is playable with other tools but not from within quicktime. This is problem since firefox will not allow you to open video files with another plugin/tool if it detects the quicktime plugin, and removing the plugin breaks safari.

I did notice that during my testing of this issue, i kept a capture framerate of 10fps with 512x384 as my resolution. When i attempted to set the framerate to 25 or 30, i noticed that playback appeared sped up when viewed with any video player.

When I attempted to add .mov file support, i at first thought that it too was non-functional... the videos would come up with the quicktime plugin's question-mark image indicating a format issue. When i tried viewing the same video 1 minute later, everything was working as expected, save for a little bit of garbled images at the beginning of each video. Overall it is good enough for me to live with. I would still be interested in trying out new code in an effort to get quicktime integration working better.

Environment

Motion version:	3.2.9
ffmpeg version:	0.4.9_p20070616
Libraries:	ffmpeg
Server OS:	2.6.23-gentoo-r3 x86_64

-- JasonWestervelt - 23 Dec 2007

Answer

Hi Jason,

You can try current svn version with a path attached in this topic :

http://www.lavrsen.dk/twiki/bin/view/Motion/SupportQuestion2005x07x14x135644

If it's stable it will be included in svn and released.

-- AngelCarpintero - 01 Jan 2008