[MPlayer-users] How do you play raw h.264 files in mplayer?

[David]

>
> My guess is that it's waiting for a keyframe or some other kind of header that is inserted in the stream periodically. If it's a live stream, it has to wait in real time, whereas if it's playing a file saved from the stream, it can read it in as fast as it likes until it finds what it's after.
>

My problem with that, is that mplayer can start playing the "piped
into a file" version almost immediately (eg: 1 second after it's
created), but when it's on a named pipe/stdin, then mplayer takes 10
seconds (or much longer - somtimes never) to detect the stream type

So I think that mplayer might have some slightly buggy "detect the
stream type" logic when it comes to pipes (it assumes it can seek in a
linear stream, constantly hits errors trying to do that,  but in the
meanwhile it's missing headers on the pipe that it could get quickly
if it was just patient and waited for a second or two).