[MPlayer-users] mplayer works with file, fails with piped file

[David Chernoff]

On Thu, 2011-05-12 at 12:43 +0200, Alexander Roalter wrote:
> On 12.05.2011 10:53, Tom Evans wrote:
> 
> > Files are seekable, pipes are not. AVIs don't play well with non
> > seekable streams, and I don't think concatenating AVI files is the
> > 'correct' method of joining AVI files.
> 
> as I understand it, he wrote that he concatenated files with mencoder.
> I would do that the following way:
> 
> mencoder file1 file2 -o file.out -oac copy -ovc copy
> 
> With that, I did never encounter problems. If the files differ in video 
> format/size and/or audio format/rate etc, I encode the single parts into 
> the same common denominator and join them later.
> 
> The only drawback is that it doesn't work well if there is some audio or 
> video missing from one of the files, so they don't get joined that 
> nicely. I have no real solution for that a.t.m.
> 

Files were concatenated with mencoder as follows:

mencoder -idx -ovc copy -oac copy file1.avi -o tmp1.avi
mencoder -idx -ovc copy -oac copy file2.avi -o tmp2.avi

mencoder -forceidx -ovc copy -oac copy tmp1.avi tmp2.avi -o file.avi

In fact, there is no audio and the formats are identical. Each
segment plays fine. The whole joined file plays fine when treated
as a file. It just doesn't work when piped.