This was taped at the time and off course I wanted the video footage :-).
The footage was straight of the digital camera it seemed (2 files of 4 gig each) and no re-coding was done yet.
When I tried to play these video files on a default install of mplayer (MPlayer 1.0rc2-SUSE Linux 10.3 (i686)-Packman-4.2.1) with the full codec package (all-20071007) it failed to play. It seemed the needed video codec was not present.
A colleague told me the first couple of bytes of the avi file should tell me the encoding (and thus the video codec I would need for playback).
A 'head' of the video (avi) file gave me following output:
RIFF���?AVI LIST<�hdrlavih8@���#��8LISTt~strlstrh8vidsCUVC It appeared that "CUCV" (also given by mplayer) and "hdrlavih8" told me (via google :-) that I needed Canopus video codecs. Some google actions later I could get those video codecs here: http://codecsbox.com/download/codec/video_codecs/canopus_hq.htm
Of course it was a windows install file (which I thus dutifully installed on my windows machine).
Some further google told me I needed following files:
'cseHQa.dll', 'CSEUvec.dll' and 'CUVCcodc.dll', all located in 'c:/windows/system32'.
I copied those over to the default codec location of mplayer (/usr/lib/codecs).
Unfortunately no joy yet.
Mplayer did not yet know of these codecs.
Some more google learned I needed to add folowing section to the 'codecs.conf' file of mplayer.
>videocodec canopushqThe codecs.config file that is refered in the documentation of mplayer (on suse: /usr/share/doc/packages/MPlayer/DOCS/HTML/en/) is unfortunately not installed by default (default config location on suse: '/etc/mplayer') and mplayer uses the default internal config.
> status working
> info "Canopus HQ Codec"
> comment "http://www.canopus.com/canopus/technology/canopuscodecs.php";
> fourcc CUVC
> driver vfw
> dll "CUVCcodc.dll"
> out BGR24
So I downloaded the sources of mplayer and found a matching codecs.conf file there.
I copied that file over to the default config loaction for mplater: /etc/mplayer and added the above mentioned entry for the canopus video codec.
Now mplayer was finding the codec it appeared but could not yet load the needed above mentioned dll files.
Fortunately this was simple uppercase/lowercase problem. So copying the dll files to all lower case filenames got that solved quickly.
Now indeed the video rendered.
