A day with video files

Nothing to do with work. Some video stuff.

Many probably knows about .fll (FLV Flash Video) file. I have got some movie files where there are some annoying discrepancy between image and sound.

I was bored today so tried to do something with it.

There is this famous Avidemux freeware with which you could fix this discrepancy. The latest is 5.2. It appears not yet nicely support the H264 video format.

When it finds that your file is in the format, it popups:

H.264 detected. If the file is using B-frames as reference it can lead to a crash or stuttering. Avidemux can use another mode which is safe but YOU WILL LOSE FRAME ACCURACY. Do you want to use that mode?

I am not at all an expert in this area, do not know what this means exactly, so went on accepting use of the "safe" mode. That appears fine. However, if you do not do what you want at this first time you open the file and close it. The popup would never come again and as the consequence, you can not open the file, unless you go to its conf file (in XML) and manually clear the history. This was the first difficulty that I encountered.

The second thing is the sound. To adjust the sound so it goes nicely, side-by-side with the video, of course you want to see the video together with the sound in its preview mode. I use a mac at home by the way. And the latest mac version of the freeware does not seem to allow me to listen to the sound.

I went back to a previous version, 4.4. Its handling of the sound device seems ok. Good! But then it does not yet support the audio format of my files!!!

So finally what I did was the following. I open each of those files with the latest, 5.2, change the audio data format to mp3, then turn to the 4.4 and shift the starting point of the sound.

A nice holiday activity.