[MPlayer-users] audiodump: -vc dummy versus -vc null

[Joe Friedrichsen]

Joe Friedrichsen wrote:

> Rich Felker wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Oct 26, 2005 at 11:47:38PM +0900, Joe Friedrichsen wrote:
>>
>>> A recent post 
>>> (http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.mplayer.user/39677) 
>>> piqued my curiosity about -vc dummy when dumping audio from videos. 
>>> Incidentally, "dummy" is not listed for $mplayer -vc help.
>>>
>>
>> That's exactly the point. You force it to try a codec name that
>> doesn't exist, and when it fails, no video decoder will get loaded and
>> video is fully disabled.
>>
> Gotcha. so "-vc tortoise" would have the same effect. This begs the 
> question then, how can you properly disable video altogether?


You might think -novideo would be the way to go, but it's not:

~/downloads/library$ mplayer -ao pcm:waveheader:file=audiodump.wav 
-novideo Pure_Pwnage_101.avi
MPlayer dev-CVS-051026-18:00-3.3.5 (C) 2000-2005 MPlayer Team
CPU: Intel Pentium 4/Celeron 4 Northwood; Pentium 4 EE/Xeon 
Prestonia,Gallatin (Family: 15, Stepping: 5)
Detected cache-line size is 64 bytes
CPUflags:  MMX: 1 MMX2: 1 3DNow: 0 3DNow2: 0 SSE: 1 SSE2: 1
Compiled for x86 CPU with extensions: MMX MMX2 SSE SSE2


Playing Pure_Pwnage_101.avi.
AVI file format detected.
AVI_NI: No video stream found.


Exiting... (End of file)
~/downloads/library$ ls audiodump.wav
ls: audiodump.wav: No such file or directory