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I've got an older Sony digital camera that's taking MPG movies which XBMC isn't playing. The only error I see in the log is:

ERROR: Open - error probing input format

I assume I don't have the correct codec for this video type. Is this something I can augment on XBMC Live?

Thanks,
-d
desau Wrote:I've got an older Sony digital camera that's taking MPG movies which XBMC isn't playing. The only error I see in the log is:

ERROR: Open - error probing input format

I assume I don't have the correct codec for this video type. Is this something I can augment on XBMC Live?

Thanks,
-d

Not really no, it comes supplied with a version of ffmpeg and you're stuck with it.
did you check which codec your camera really uses? Not exactly elegant, but you could recode your videos.
Hmm.. unfortunately the specs and manual doesn't tell me. Just says "MPEG" video. Lots of help there .. thanks Sony.

It's a Sony DSC-T100.

I wouldn't mind re-encoding all the videos .. I could setup something to automate that task. However, I don't want to lose quality .. is there any way to re-encode these without losing quality?
this should shed some light on things
http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Cod...t_requests
So - I'm wondering if this is actually a codec problem. Here's what VideoSpec tells me about this movie ..

Shouldn't this be playable by XBMC?


*** General Parameters ***
- Name: MOV02891.MPG
- Container: Mpeg Program Stream
- Size: 21.6 MB
- Duration: 16s 524ms
- Bitrate: 10.5 Mbps

*** Video Track Parameters ***
- Format: MPEG-1 Video
- Bitrate: Max.: Undefined / Average: 10.2 Mbps / Min.: Undefined
- Frame rate (fps): Max.: Undefined / Average: 30.000 / Min.: Undefined
- Encoding profile: Undefined
- Width (Pixel number): 640*480
- Pixel Aspect Ratio: 1:1
- Display Aspect Ratio: 4:3
- Interlacing: Progressive

*** First Audio Track Parameters ***
- Format: Mpeg-1 layer 2 (mp2)
- Bitrate: 64.0 Kbps
- Resolution: Undefined
- Profile: Layer 2
- Channel(s): mono
- Position: -

*** Miscellaneous ***
- Subtitle(s): No Subtitle
- Album: Undefined
- Performer: Undefined
- Genre: Undefined
- Encoded date: Undefined
- Album artist: Undefined
mpeg 1 Smile

dunno why xbmc won't play it, ffmpeg should handle this ancient codec.
Anyway, if you recode it with handbrake you shouldn't lose any noticable quality - and it would be 1/10 of the size Smile
Indeed.. and this doesn't appear to be a problem with ffmpeg / mplayer, rather a problem with XBMC.

I dropped to the shell, installed mplayer (I'm using XBMC Live), using apt-get install mplayer

SFTP'd the movie over locally, then ran:
mplayer MOV02891.MPG

And it plays fine.

Now if I can just figure out how to make XBMC use the libraries that I just installed...
Following up on this. I was using XBMC 9, I updated to 10, videos still wouldn't play. Updated to pre-11 (using apt-get from the XBMCubuntu page instructions), and now the videos play. I guess there was some codec problem in XBMC 9, 10's ffmpeg libs, but with the libs from XBMC 11, it's working).

I should also note that I'm 95% sure that these videos used to play when I was using XBMC from circa 2005 on an original Xbox.