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Quicktime and VLC won't playback h264 video

A

ArtIsLife

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 1, 2007
16
0
Hello, all. I have an iMac G5. Running Leopard 10.5.2. It's working just swimmingly... except that it won't play back h264 video. I have the latest versions of both Quicktime and VLC.

Each app handles the video files differently.

Quicktime will give me this message:

"The movie could not be opened.

An invalid sample description was found in the movie."


VLC will play the audio, but not the video.




My computer can handle HD playback just fine (I watch most of my movies in 720p AVI files,) so that can't be the problem.


This is just driving me insane. Does anyone have a solution for me?


If this is in the wrong forum -- could a mod move it to the correct one, please?
 
ArtIsLife said:
It's mp4. :|
Do you think I'm that dumb?
Click to expand...
richthomas asked a legit question, there wasn't anything implied about your level of intelligence in his/her question.

Anyway, if not even VLC can play back the video, then you're mostly likely screwed. Sounds like the h264 is either corrupt or else the container is corrupt. You can try using VisualHub to either remux or transcode (to mov if you want). Try remuxing first, if that doesn't work then try transcoding. If VisualHub can't read the file, then probably best to just give up.
 
stomer said:
richthomas asked a legit question, there wasn't anything implied about your level of intelligence in his/her question.

Anyway, if not even VLC can play back the video, then you're mostly likely screwed. Sounds like the h264 is either corrupt or else the container is corrupt. You can try using VisualHub to either remux or transcode (to mov if you want). Try remuxing first, if that doesn't work then try transcoding. If VisualHub can't read the file, then probably best to just give up.
Click to expand...

Of course he knows that.

Do you think he's that dumb? :rolleyes:
 
orpheus1120 said:
Of course he knows that.

Do you think he's that dumb? :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

richthomas said:
no? could be .mp4, .mov, .m4v... when i had some H264s that didnt work renaming them to .mov fixed them.

can you open them with in QuickTime Player and save it as a self-contained movie?
Click to expand...

wait so whos dumb haha? wait two negatives make a positive in my mathematical mind so where all smart! woo!

anyways so hows your H264s going?
 
I'm using OSXBMC to play all of my H.264 HD content now. Not that it will help in the case of the OP since I agree he probably has a screwed encode but the OS X port of XBMC is the only media player on the Mac (VLC, MPlayerOSX, Quicktime, etc included) that plays silky smooth 1080p H.264 in my experience.

It's also a slick and maybe someday soon viable challenger for Front Row.
 
SaSaSushi said:
probably has a screwed encode but the OS X port of XBMC is the only media player on the Mac (VLC, MPlayerOSX, Quicktime, etc included) that plays silky smooth 1080p H.264 in my experience.
Click to expand...
Not sure I understand how it can playback better than mplayer since OSXmbc relies on mplayer to render its video.
 
richthomas said:
wait so whos dumb haha? wait two negatives make a positive in my mathematical mind so where all smart! woo!
Click to expand...

Don't you just hate it when that voice recognition software mixes up very similar words such as "where" and "we're?" ;)
 
siorai said:
Don't you just hate it when that voice recognition software mixes up very similar words such as "where" and "we're?" ;)
Click to expand...

oh how embarrassing! :eek: of course i meant "we're" dude it was a typo. sounds exactly the same in voice recognition. btw im not Stephen Hawking.

or where you implying that i used voice recognition to type the above? hey im not using Vista HAHA! :D
 
stomer said:
Not sure I understand how it can playback better than mplayer since OSXmbc relies on mplayer to render its video.
Click to expand...

Huh? OSXBMC uses FFMPEG as does MPlayer. OSXBMC has no other relation to MPlayer that I know of. Even if it does use MPlayer code it is in much more active development with a new build out about every 2 weeks.

OSXBMC plays 1080p content back smoothly on my 24" iMac that chokes or gets out of sync on both MPlayer and VLC.
 
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