[MPlayer-users] movie from single png image

[Patrick Wambacq]

Hi,

In my lab we do research on speech recognition. Lately we have been transcribing
lots of broadcast radio  news automatically with our system. A way to present
the results that allows many users to view them is to combine the audio track
with subtitles (.srt format generated from the speech recognition output). With
QuickTime Pro I managed to produce a video starting from a single .png image
that is looped as long as necessary to match the length of the audio (thus with
a static background). Many movie players then are capable to load and show the
subtitle file along with this video.

But I want to generate this video with mplayer instead of QuickTime Pro because
this process ideally should run on Linux and not on a Mac and it should be
possible to easily script it. I've been searching with google to find the
correct mplayer options but was unsuccessful. I have been using commands such as

mencoder mf://test.png -mf type=png:fps=0.01 -ovc lavc -lavcopts \
vcodec=mpeg4 -ofps 25 -audiofile test.mp3 -of mpeg -oac copy -o test.mp4

and several variants but this is not successful. I also would like to get rid
of the fps=0.01 specification because I don't want a 100 sec video but one that
is exactly as long as the audio track. The resulting video should also contain
all frames from the start to the end and not just a single frame with the
instruction to repeat it until the end. I am a newbie here, so I am expressing
myself maybe not good enough here - with the video generated by QuickTime Pro
I initially had problems of VLC or mplayer not showing the subtitles, until I
exported the video as a DV stream (effectively containing all frames - all
identical), and then later converted it to mpeg4 to decrease it's size.

Can anyone point me to the right options for mplayer?

Thanks in advance

Patrick