Playing back oddball MP4 recordings?

[voip-ninja 0]

Does anyone know of special tools/filters for playing back odd MP4 surveillance videos? I recently tried switching all of my CCTV camera recording profiles (using Surveillance Station) to H.264. The videos seem to record properly and they play back within Surveillance Station tools properly, but if I download them to a desktop on Windows or Mac OS the video just shows a small horizontal color bar when played... like a filter, etc, is missing.

 

I observe when looking at the recording parameters for H264 that the Samsung camera has been set to;

 

Codec - H264

"Default Profile"

ATC mode - Off

ATC Sensitivity - Very High

ATC limit - 50%

 

20 fps

compression - best

Maximum bitrate 5120

 

And under the "advanced" section -

Bitrate control - VBR

Encoding Priority - Framerate

GOV length - 15

Profile - High (other choices are Baseline or Main)

Entropy coding - CAVLC

 

Anyone have any ideas? The properties seem to be set by Surveillance Station but I'd like to have useable videos that I can play back locally if need be.

[msecure 0]

Does anyone know of special tools/filters for playing back odd MP4 surveillance videos? I recently tried switching all of my CCTV camera recording profiles (using Surveillance Station) to H.264. The videos seem to record properly and they play back within Surveillance Station tools properly, but if I download them to a desktop on Windows or Mac OS the video just shows a small horizontal color bar when played... like a filter, etc, is missing.

 

Anyone have any ideas? The properties seem to be set by Surveillance Station but I'd like to have useable videos that I can play back locally if need be.

Try using G-Spot to find out what codec it is. http://gspot.headbands.com/

[videotiger 0]

I use VLC (http://www.videolan.org/) as my go-to player for Windows and MacOS. It also has a function in the menus to display the video and audio encoding information.

[voip-ninja 0]

According to VLC this is H.264 MPEG4-AVC (part 10) avc1

 

It can't play it back either.

 

Looks like for these cams I will have to go back to crappy MJPEG since that's the only thing that "really really" works with all of my stuff. Disappointing.

[voip-ninja 0]

Would it help if I uploaded one of the problem recordings and let folks take a stab at it?

[Kawboy12R 0]

Yep.

[voip-ninja 0]

okey dokey;

 

http://www.pagefamily.net/temp/samsungdoorcamsample.mp4

 

In any event, I could not get these files to play properly using Synology's app (or other playback apps) on my iOS devices or Android devices, so I was forced to switch the Samsungs back to a different format.

 

Still curious about what the hell is going on with the weird files though so if anyone has ideas would love to hear them.

[hardwired 0]

Handbrake http://sourceforge.net/projects/handbrake/?source=dlp converted it to an mp4 that plays fine in VLC, etc.

[ak357 0]

Handbrake http://sourceforge.net/projects/handbrake/?source=dlp converted it to an mp4 that plays fine in VLC, etc.

Yep,

using handbrake will play fine in VLC

[videotiger 0]

FFmpeg gives the following assessment of the mp4 health:

 

FFmpeg version SVN-r22666, Copyright © 2000-2010 the FFmpeg developers

built on Mar 25 2010 06:05:35 with gcc 4.4.2

configuration: --enable-memalign-hack --cross-prefix=i686-mingw32- --cc=ccache-i686-mingw32-gcc --arch=i686 --target-os=mingw32 --en

ble-runtime-cpudetect --enable-avisynth --enable-gpl --enable-version3 --enable-bzlib --enable-libgsm --enable-libfaad --enable-pthrea

s --enable-libvorbis --enable-libtheora --enable-libspeex --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libopenjpeg --enable-libxvid --enable-libschroe

inger --enable-libx264 --enable-libopencore_amrwb --enable-libopencore_amrnb

libavutil 50.12. 0 / 50.12. 0

libavcodec 52.60. 0 / 52.60. 0

libavformat 52.57. 1 / 52.57. 1

libavdevice 52. 2. 0 / 52. 2. 0

libswscale 0.10. 0 / 0.10. 0

[mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2 @ 0037bd40]max_analyze_duration reached

 

Seems stream 0 codec frame rate differs from container frame rate: 2002.00 (2002/1) -> 1001.00 (2002/2)

Input #0, mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2, from 'test.mp4':

Metadata:

major_brand : isom

minor_version : 0

compatible_brands: mp41

Duration: 00:00:22.72, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 5170 kb/s

Stream #0.0(eng): Video: h264, yuv420p, 1280x1024, 2955 kb/s, 16.90 fps, 1001 tbr, 1001 tbn, 2002 tbc

Stream #0.1(eng): Data: stts / 0x73747473

 

My guess is that the generator of that MPEG4 file is generating an invalid MPEG4 file. I've run into that with NVR and standalone DVR's.

[voip-ninja 0]

OK guys, thanks for the info. The most distressing thing was that Synology must have set these options up for recording because those recordings play fine from the Synology web server. They do not however play on anything else, and since they don't play on the mobile devices I have (even via Synology's app) the recordings are useless to me.

 

Fortunately the other MPEG4 option for the Samsungs seems to be more flexible, I can get those to play back in my other devices. Thanks for all of the info.