On Tuesday 05 January 2021 14:06:25 Michael via tde-users wrote:

On Tuesday 05 January 2021 12:53:26 pm Gene Heskett via tde-users

wrote:

...

Greetings all;

I can't find a working mp4 player.

Debian Stretch install, uptodate AO this morning.

SMPlayer, Noatun, Kaboodle, VLC, mpv all show up under 'Open with' on my system. I'm sure there's tons more though...

But I've tried all those, no response, back to the prompt in a second or so.

kaffiene at least gives a moov-atom not found if start from a konsole. What a "moov-atom"?

Best, Michael

Thanks Michael.

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Cheers, Gene Heskett

On Tuesday 05 January 2021 14:08:53 deloptes via tde-users wrote:

Gene Heskett via tde-users wrote:

...

Debian Stretch install, uptodate AO this morning.

Cheers, Gene Heskett

Gene, why Stretch and also if you need mp4 player why not use the http://deb-multimedia.org

Stretch mainly because its working fairly well, and I'm a lazy old fart.

deb http://deb-multimedia.org buster main non-free

not sure if they support stretch ... but it is the best source for debian multimedia. I gave up on VLC long time ago. I use mplayer since then and I ported kplayer to TDE (not sure if it is officially in although it seems it might be in the PSBs or such). https://mirror.git.trinitydesktop.org/gitea/TDE/kplayer I can just highly recommend it as it is using mplayer as the video engine.

regards

I just installed some more stuff, a dozen or so but kaffiene is still unhappy.

06:36:12 PM: xine: couldn't find demux for

file:///home/gene/dwhelper/Intel®%20Desktop%20Board%20D525MW%20—

%20Product%20Guides.mp4< 06:36:12 PM: xine: found input plugin : file input plugin 06:36:12 PM: video_decoder: can't raise nice priority by 1: Operation not permitted 06:36:12 PM: video_out: can't raise nice priority by 2: Operation not permitted

I''ll edit that repo to be oldstable and try again. But no luck, all uptodate.

Thanks deloptes

Cheers, Gene Heskett

On Tuesday 05 January 2021 16:30:49 Gene Heskett via tde-users wrote:

Can you imagine an old fart like me with smoke coming out of his ears?

Yes, I can. I am also losing patience with this new-and-improved digital-smart everything, where we are always-on, and must be diligent about keeping everything up-to-date and secure.

I can only imagine that it is much much worse for you, and I know how hard it is for me to wrestle with this crap every day. I would like to find a cave up in the mountains, power everything with solar panels, and just check out of the modern world. Also the human race, taken collectively or in large groups, fills me with uneasiness, fear, despair ... but at least I am doing better than most other people, who are losing jobs, maybe homes, and of course their family members.

Eventually, though, even if you stay off the Internet, the media players your unsupported Stretch and/or Wheezy systems will stop playing some formats, because they keep changing things. And like I said, Buster/Beowulf will be supported for years to come. So -- when things in your life get more bearable -- consider upgrading your system.

And keep hanging in, there!

Bill

On Tuesday 05 January 2021 23:58:20 deloptes via tde-users wrote:

William Morder via tde-users wrote:

...

Eventually, though, even if you stay off the Internet, the media players your unsupported Stretch and/or Wheezy systems will stop playing some formats, because they keep changing things. And like I said, Buster/Beowulf will be supported for years to come. So -- when things in your life get more bearable -- consider upgrading your system.

I must disagree - no one is changing the standards. At least I am not aware of things changing in already released formats. What may not work are new formats where you may not have the new codec.

Hmmm, well, I remember it happening in the past, back when I was still running KDE3, and resisted upgrading. However, that was many years ago, so my memory is a little fuzzy.

Bill

On Wednesday 06 January 2021 08:05:25 Michael via tde-users wrote:

On Wednesday 06 January 2021 02:59:33 am William Morder via tde-users wrote:

...

On Tuesday 05 January 2021 23:58:20 deloptes via tde-users wrote:

...

William Morder via tde-users wrote:

...

Eventually, though, even if you stay off the Internet, the media players your unsupported Stretch and/or Wheezy systems will stop playing some formats, because they keep changing things. And like I said, Buster/Beowulf will be supported for years to come. So -- when things in your life get more bearable -- consider upgrading your system.

I must disagree - no one is changing the standards. At least I am not aware of things changing in already released formats. What may not work are new formats where you may not have the new codec.

Hmmm, well, I remember it happening in the past, back when I was still running KDE3, and resisted upgrading. However, that was many years ago, so my memory is a little fuzzy.

Bill is right. For whatever reason updates to software players using codecs do sometimes 'break' the ability to play existing (older) files. I've experienced this multiple times (100s probably) since the '90s (and my mother has lost some family videos to this phenomenon).

I've experience all of these situations:

• Software no longer includes the older codec and you can hunt down and

re-install the codec manually and it will play again.

• Software no longer includes the older codec and you can hunt down and

re-install the codec manually and it still will NOT play.

• Software claims to have the codec, but, while newer created files will

play correctly, older created files will NOT play.

Add in a bunch of situations to the above of mangled playing of older files (think old VHS playbacks).

Bit rot is probably responsible for some of it, but I’ve experienced cases (saved one of mom’s holiday videos) where copying the file to an ‘old’ machine (was literally stuck in a closet and hadn’t been updated in 5+ years) allowed the file to play ‘fine’ and was also able to convert the file to another format which then played correctly on the ‘new’ machine.

My rule of thumb is to convert any codec using file that I care about into 3 different formats for archiving.

HTH, Michael

Overnight, it suddenly occurred to me: when I downloaded mp4 videos from YouTube, I remembered that they were all pixelated and impossible to watch. My other mp4s, from other sources, played just fine. So I hung onto the videos, but couldn't watch them. Then when I upgraded (when moving from the 'buntus to Debian, then later to Devuan), I discovered that suddenly all those unwatchable YouTube mp4s played just fine again.

And it didn't matter what player I used, because it was the fact that I used an older distro that was causing the problem.

Bill

On Wednesday 06 January 2021 02:54:03 deloptes via tde-users wrote:

William Morder via tde-users wrote:

...

Like yourself, I imagine, I hate change, hate the need to rebuild my system that was working just fine. But once that release is no longer supported, it doesn't make much sense to keep using it for years beyond its security updates; whereas Buster/Beowulf LTS will be supported for -- how long is it? -- 5-7 more years.

Yes indeed - I can use a VM as a guinea pig, but not my own PC, so usually I would wait a bit after a release updating my production system(s). The good thing is that many people use testing and report back issues, so that these issues get solved. I do not see a reason not to upgrade to stable couple of months before it becomes old stable.

Just install and try mplayer from the command line - I am sure it was working fine with mp4 files under stretch.

read this: https://wiki.debian.org/MultimediaCodecs

I followed the instructions there, made no diff. Now have 6 players in the menu, but none work. This all Just Worked a year ago running wheezy.

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Cheers, Gene Heskett

On Wednesday 06 January 2021 05:59:43 Steven D'Aprano via tde-users wrote:

On Wed, Jan 06, 2021 at 05:04:39AM -0500, Gene Heskett via tde-users

wrote:

...

I followed the instructions there, made no diff. Now have 6 players in the menu, but none work.

Define "none work". Does nothing launch at all? Do you get a "busy" mouse cursor but no window opens? Does a window open but then it crashes? Something else?

All launch, and all ignore but show in the titlebars, the file selected, but they won't play it.

What happens if you launch the player from the command line?

mplayer myvideo.avi

protectng the many spaces filename with double quotes, gets this response in a konsole:

gene@coyote:~/AppImages$ cd ../dwhelper gene@coyote:~/dwhelper$ ls -l total 6860 -rw-r--r-- 1 gene gene 4626478 May 19 2015 Intel® Desktop Board D525MW — Product Guides.mp4 -rw-r--r-- 1 gene gene 2396013 May 19 2015 Intel® Desktop Board D525MW — Quick Reference Poster.mp4 gene@coyote:~/dwhelper$ mplayer "Intel® Desktop Board D525MW — Product Guides.mp4" MPlayer 1.3.0 (Debian), built with gcc-6.2.1 (C) 2000-2016 MPlayer Team do_connect: could not connect to socket connect: No such file or directory Failed to open LIRC support. You will not be able to use your remote control.

Playing Intel® Desktop Board D525MW — Product Guides.mp4. libavformat version 57.56.101 (external) Mismatching header version 57.56.100 libavformat file format detected. [mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2 @ 0x7f666212ad00]moov atom not found LAVF_header: av_open_input_stream() failed libavformat file format detected. [mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2 @ 0x7f666212ad00]moov atom not found LAVF_header: av_open_input_stream() failed

Exiting... (End of file)

And I repeat, what the heck is a "moov atom"?

Will the players play *any* multimedia formats at all?

Not sure, I don't have a huge assortment stashed.

https://filesamples.com/categories/video

and mplayer plays one of the full screen samples flawlessly.

Cheers, Gene Heskett

Hmm, interesting. If you rename the file to remove the ".mp4" extension, and then run the "file" command, what does it report?

Technically, you may not even need to remove the .mp4 extension.

I wonder whether the file is:

- not actually an mp4, but just close enough to one to fool mplayer into thinking it is (probably unlikely);

- or more likely, corrupted.

Can you re-download the video and check whether it is the same?

(Running diff on the old copy and the new will tell you if there are any differences.)

If you have a URL for the original, I'm willing to download it myself and see if I can get it to play.