[MPlayer-users] Broken avi streams (?)

[D Richard Felker III]

On Mon, Nov 04, 2002 at 01:18:11AM +0200, Yourself wrote:
> Hi all. For the last day, i've been downloading a movie from direct
> connect. I'm now at 75%. When i try to play the incomplete movie, if
> i use the -idx switch, the indexing stops at 47%. Needless to say,
> mplayer stops playback at 47%. 
> 
> In a desperate attempt to view the remaining movie, i used aviplay,
> which started reconstructing the index, and some time later it said that
> it found a broken avi stream and that is trying to fix it. After some
> more time, it started playing, and indeed played all the 75%. 
> 
> I haven't tested what happens if I start playing with mplayer without
> recostructing the index. (I guess it will stop again, as mencoder -ovc
> copy blah,blah stopped there also).
> 
> Is there any way of reconstructing the index in broken avi streams? Jump
> to the next key frame, or something? Is there any way of playing the
> entire file with mplayer and seek in it?

I had a similar experience with a broken avi file, and I did the
following to fix it: First, I used ffmpeg with -acodec copy -vcodec
copy to generate a working avi file. It seems more tolerant of damage
to the avi structure than mplayer is... Then, since ffmpeg generates
broken non-interleaved avi files when using -acodec copy, I used
mencoder -oac copy -ovc copy to remux it into a working file.

Since ffmpeg handled it fine, presumably mplayer could be improved to
do so as well. Unfortunately I think I deleted the broken source file,
so I can't upload it to mplayerhq... :(

Rich