MPEG-4 Movies

[Daniel Robitaille]

ZIYAD A. M. AL-BATLY wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-07-08 at 13:35 +0200, Marek Pawinski wrote:
> 
>>Hi
>>
>>How does one go about playing mpeg-4 movies with the mp4 extension ?
>>I downloaded some open source TV episodes with MS in them and weird 
>>enough they made them a mission to get to play.
>>
>>Marek
>>
> 
> (What do you mean by "with MS in them"?  I couldn't understand that
> sentence.)
> 
> MP4 files are either media files in Quicktime ".mov" file format (which
> is the new stander file format for the MPEG organization) or audio only
> files using AAC (Advanced Audio Coding, just like the ones from Apples's
> iTunes Internet store).  I'm not sure, but I think AAC is also a
> Quicktime file.
> 
> 
> MPlayer, and Totem (with the Xine pack-end) should play them fine.  Just
> install the packages "totem-xine" and "w32codecs"¹ and try playing them
> with Totem.
>
> Ziyad.

I actually wrote an e-mail about this yesterday on the Sounder list:
http://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/sounder/2005-July/002195.html

I still haven't managed to get any sound out of these video on the
Linux side using either Hoary or Breezy (but the video is fine). On the Windows-side,
they work fine using QuickTime).


The format of these mp4 files is described on this page:
http://www.go-opensource.org/go_open/news/download_go_open/

"More info about the video encoding: mpeg-4 with mp4 container. This is the codec known as "libavcodec mpeg-4". 
Compatible with DivX 4 and DivX 5 players and introduced by the ffmpeg open-source project, it's an incredibly fast 
encoding engine, now Altivec optimized, and also one of the highest quality MPEG-4 codecs around, constantly improved. 
This is 'true' MPEG4, as audio track is AAC (as an .AVI container cannot handle AAC)."




-- 
Daniel Robitaille