I HATE proprietary video codecs!

[Sarra]

So, we have a rat problem. One got under the house and died, so during the worst fire in the history of Oregon, we have no AC, and no way to filter the air in our house. If we turn the AC on, it smells like rotting rat.

 

As an attempt at finding where these little bastards are getting under the house, we repurposed a Wildlife Innovations trail camera. I set it for Video, put it on a tripod, and got a test video.

 

I cannot open the test video. It's a .avi but there is no possible way to get the codec from Wildgame's website. They literally do NOT have a 'support' section. They sell a smartphone adapter, but I will not be using it. I've searched for wildgame innovations video codec, video player, and anything else that I can think of, but everything goes to cnet which is basically a slideshow program for stills. IE, useless AF.

 

So, does anyone know which codec this uses? I've got VLC installed, but it refuses to open the .avi files, and I'm at a loss...

[Electronics Wizardy]

what error does vlc give? 

 

Try tools like ffmpeg to read the metadata about what codec there is.

 

 

[mariushm]

Are we supposed to guess?

How about you upload a short clip (add as attachment here in a zip file, up to 20 MB I think)

 

It may be just a standard xvid or motion jpeg with a changed FOURCC signature (so you could add a registry key to get it to play with  a standard codec like h264 or mjpeg)

[pythonmegapixel]

Is this a deliberate DRM scheme to make you buy their accessories, or just something caused by crap design?

[Mark Kaine]

50 minutes ago, Sarra said:

It's a .avi 

 

40 minutes ago, pythonmegapixel said:

Is this a deliberate DRM scheme to make you buy their accessories, or just something caused by crap design?

 

42 minutes ago, mariushm said:

Are we supposed to guess?

How about you upload a short clip (add as attachment here in a zip file, up to 20 MB I think)

 

It may be just a standard xvid or motion jpeg with a changed FOURCC signature (so you could add a registry key to get it to play with  a standard codec like h264 or mjpeg)

 

47 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

what error does vlc give? 

 

Try tools like ffmpeg to read the metadata about what codec there is.

 

 

AVI is a fairly standard code most players should have no issues with (yes VLC is a good choice)

 

That also explains why there is no codec to download on their site because why would it when it's widely supported by many players.

 

Edit: VLC should work...

 

 

Reinstall make sure all codecs get installed, not sure that is weird. Post a screenshot of the files. Also error code from VLC or otherwise if there is one.

 

PS: just checked windows 10 built-in video player plays avi too.

 

So if it doesn't that's certainly weird.

 

You can also try renaming to .mp4.

 

That too works for me, no issues.

[mariushm]

AVI is a container, just like MP4 or MKV.

 

Inside the container you can have video tracks , audio tracks, subtitles etc... video tracks can be encoded with a codec (ex mpeg2, h264/xvid/divx , h264/mpeg4 avc, vp8, vp9, av1, motion jpeg, cineform etc etc) , audio tracks with another codec (ex uncompressed wav, flac, mp3, aac, opus, wma) , subtitles with another codec (ex srt, sub, ssa)

 

A video player may be able to play AVI files but may refuse to play one file if it doesn't support the video or audio codec that was used to encode that specific track or if you have no such codec installed on your computer.

The codec required to decode a track is specified with a signature called FOURCC inside the AVI file ... ex it's h263 or xvid for mpeg4-asp aka xvid/divx. See https://softron.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/207695697-List-of-FourCC-codes-for-video-codecs

If they changed the fourcc code to something custom, it's possible a video player won't play the video file even though the player may actually support decoding that encoding method, simply because the player doesn't know that custom fourcc code is equal to that codec.

 

16 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

AVI is a fairly standard code most players should have no issues with (yes VLC is a good choice)

 

 

[Mark Kaine]

@mariushm that's a good explanation, so one would need to change this

10 minutes ago, mariushm said:

FOURCC

signature and it should (might) work?

[mariushm]

No idea, it's just one scenario, one possibility.

But yeah, there's tools that can edit avi files to change the fourcc code without recompressing the whole video, for example: https://www.videohelp.com/software/AVI-FourCC-Code-Changer

 

[GDRRiley]

2 hours ago, Lord Vile said:

This is why I have a Mac that can do pretty much all codecs 

so can windows. its just down to program support for them.

[Lord Vile]

1 hour ago, GDRRiley said:

so can windows. its just down to program support for them.

But with a Mac I can just convert it into a friendly codec out of box and ship it off wherever. Did it for a friend.