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MPEG4 playback in Windows Media Player, MPlayer, and VLC

SteveG10854
Intellectual 510 points

Just maybe a useful note to anyone wanting to play their MPEG4 files under Windows and finding like I did that Windows Media Player doesn't want to know.

After some digging, it seems Microsoft says they may no longer support MPEG4 for licencing reasons: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/819758/

However, MPlayer and SMPlayer do play the files OK.

You can also get VLC to playback the files OK, but you have to rename them from being ".mpeg4" extension to ".m4v"

 

  • Prodigy 50 points

    Hi Steve

    I can sucessfully play MP4 files from other sources in Windows Media Player, so I must have the original MP4 codec from when Microsoft did support MP4 installed, however I cannot play the MPEG4 files generated from a DM355 demo card, regardless of the extension I give them.

    Do you have any idea why this is and what I can do to make the video files compatible with WMP ?

    Thanks

    Pete Jarman

  • in reply to Peter Jarman
    TI__Mastermind 37340 points

    I belive WMP expects some additional conatiner data around the elemetary stream for information such as resolution, frame rate... .  DM355 provides a raw elementary stream, hence normally you would need to pass additional information to the player (e.g. I would suspect resolution at minimum).  Anyway, I have not throughly checked my facts here, but providing my commentary for further investigation....

  • in reply to Juan Gonzales
    Intellectual 510 points

    I’m looking at how to get the DM355 recorded files playing back on a PC using Windows Media Player (or at least playing with QuickTime to start with).

    The files produced by the DM355 encoder codec are just raw data. I’ve put them into an MPEG4 container, using a file header atom “ftyp” defined as “mp42 mp41 isom”, and a movie contents atom “mdat” defined with the movie length (plus atom size).

    The atom config I’ve used was derived from an MPEG4 format file which was recorded as native MPEG4 on a camera system, and that file plays back OK in QuickTime and WMP (if the codec is installed).

    The DM355 encoded video however, even within this container, is not recognised by WMP or QuickTime.

    It’s as though either the “ftyp” for the frames produced by the DM355 encoder is not one of the list of “mp42 mp41 isom”, or the frames are not encoded in true MPEG4.

    Maybe someone could suggest a container, or a suitable “ftyp” value for the DM355 encoded frames?

    Many thanks.

  • in reply to SteveG10854
    TI__Mastermind 41665 points

    This is probably not really what you want to do, but you can make a video encoded by the DM355 playable in WMP by converting it with Super, however I cannot get it to work by just doing a stream copy into the new container, it only seems to work if I do a transcode (even if MPEG4 -> MPEG4). Of course I was only trying AVI, there are a lot of other options and containers in Super that could be tweaked, so it is possible some permutation of options will let you do a direct stream copy. If you could get a container copy to work in Super you could probably figure out what it is doing underneath and perform the operations directly using the various tools Super is relying on.