FLV4 video - which codec do I need?

Marko Vojinovic vvmarko at gmail.com
Tue Mar 2 10:49:11 UTC 2010


On Tuesday 02 March 2010 04:07:11 am john wendel wrote:
> I've got an FLV4 encoded video that I'd like to watch. Mplayer says
> 
> > [mkv] Track ID 1: video (V_MS/VFW/FOURCC), -vid 0
> > [mkv] Track ID 2: audio (A_MPEG/L3), -aid 0, -alang jpn
> > [mkv] Track ID 3: subtitles (S_TEXT/ASS), -sid 0, -slang eng
> > [mkv] Will play video track 1.
> > Matroska file format detected.
> > VIDEO:  [FLV4]  640x368  0bpp  25.000 fps    0.0 kbps ( 0.0 kbyte/s)
> > [vdpau] Error when calling vdp_device_create_x11: 1
> > =========================================================================
> > = Cannot find codec matching selected -vo and video format 0x34564C46.
> > ========================================================================
> > ==
> 
> I downloaded and installed the "all" codec pack from the mplayer
> website, didn't help.

FLV4 is the Flash Video file format, apparently inside the Matroska (mkv) file 
container. You can read for example

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_Video
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matroska

Flash video should be playable in general by mplayer, with the usual codec 
suite, nothing special. So if it doesn't work for you, there are two 
possibilities:

1) The file is broken. Are you able to play it elsewhere? On Windows? Where did 
you get it? Maybe the download was bad, can you check md5sum or similar?

2) Your mplayer configuration is broken somehow. Post the complete output of
"mplayer -v insertfilename". The line

> > = Cannot find codec matching selected -vo and video format 0x34564C46.

is begging the question what video output driver do you use (do a
"mplayer -vo help" to see all options available for you, see "man mplayer" and 
other docs to read about them). The usual driver is xv, and if that doesn't 
work for some reason, the usual second choice is x11. You can try to force 
mplayer to use one of them:

mplayer -vo xv insertfilename
mplayer -vo x11 insertfilename

The video output driver of mplayer is usually determined by the capabilities 
of your graphics hardware. What card do you have ("lspci | grep vga")? What 
drivers do you use for it? Do you see anything suspicious while playing other 
movies with mplayer?

HTH, :-)
Marko




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