Demuxing/Encoding .pmf (PSP) video files

[Cyber Akuma]

I tried that

"mencoder.exe raw.264 -of avi -ovc copy -noskip -ofps 29.97"

The resulting AVI is unplayable in just about everything but mplayer.

[Joe Forster/STA]

Can you send me a sample (at most, a few Megabytes) in a (zipped!) E-mail attachment?

[Cyber Akuma]

Of what? The original, the raw extracted 264 stream, or the avi?

And how will I only rar a few kb of it? Copy and paste with a hex editor?

[Joe Forster/STA]

A sample of the original stream that you wanted to convert with MEncoder (but the result was not playable on most media players, as you wrote). Yeah, I guess, a copy & paste of the first, say, 2 Megabytes would be fine. (Hopefully, it's streamable: it's not a problem if it's end is missing, unlike e.g. AVI's!) Make sure that the sample is also playable with MPlayer!

[Joe Forster/STA]

I used the following command line to re-package the raw H.264 stream, you sent, into an AVI container:

<path>\mencoder -of avi -ovc copy -o copyrawxclip.avi copyrawxclip.264

And then I manually edited the resulting AVI in a hexa editor because it had a weird FourCC. At offset 0x0070, the bytes 0x05 0x00 0x00 0x10 were changed to the string "h264"; at offset 0x00BC, the same four bytes were changed to "H264".

I didn't find a properly working general Video for Windows or DirectShow filter (video codec) for H.264 streams:
- The download at http://www.free-codecs.com/x264_Vide...c_download.htm is not a codec, rather the the encoder software.
- The latest ffdshow at http://ffdshow.sourceforge.net/tikiw...etting+ffdshow simply doesn't work for this media type.
So I tried VLC player 0.8.5 (see a download at http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/win/27193 ), with its built-in H.264 decoder; the AVI sample played fine. I hope this helps!

[Edit] Ohhh, as for AC3 streams:
- Get the WinAMP AC3 input plugin from http://winampac3.sourceforge.net to be able to play AC3 audio (and check if a particular file is indeed in AC3 format).
- Get BeSweet from http://dspguru.doom9.net to convert among all kinds of audio formats: WAV, MP3, AC3, OGG, DTS. If you like, I can give you batch files that help with converting any audio format (that BeSweet can handle as input) to WAV, MP3, AC3 or OGG format.

[Cyber Akuma]

Hmm, well, first of all I needed to add two more switches to mencoder, "-noski"p and "-ofps 29.97"

Without -noskip I just get a useless 4k junk file.

I had tried using the FourCC changer included with the Xvid codec to change it before I had posted this problem here, but it didnt work.

So, I tried what you said about manually editing it with a hex editor.

It still would not play in MPC (yes, I can play other h264 video in it) but worked in VLC. Id really want this file to be playable in just about anything that supports AVI and the h264 codec, which is just about every player I know of except for WMP, so I can't have an AVI file that only works in VLC, since the file is likely still slightly corrupt.

Also, the file was filled with instances of this text "[= MPlayer junk data! =]", any idea why that is there?

Ill look into that plugin and program for converting the audio.

[Joe Forster/STA]

As for the need for those extra two command line options, perhaps, you're using a different version of MEncoder than I do. I'm using version "dev-CVS-050928-16:38-3.4.2" (the 1.0 pre8 release).

I do rip DVD's myself but I always use the XviD codec. I have no idea about where an official, usable H.264 codec exists for Windows, if at all. (Do you know a definitive download location for such a codec?!) If there's no such package, it shouldn't be a surprise that you can't play H.264 video in any media player, only ones that explicitly support it, with some custom DLL of their own...

Don't mind the junk data; yes, MPlayer adds that to the unused parts of the header, but that's just garbage, it's not there instead of anything useful!