Image Alt Text: "After downloading a 2.5GB movie

Me: Presses play Movie unsupported file" A person is shown with eyes on her laptop punching the wall beside her, causing it to crack.

      • terminhell@lemmy.world
        38·
        11 months ago

        Happened to me a few months ago. Had a ticket for our District Attorney office, trying to playback a security camera footage from a parking lot or something. It would open, but, the person that was supposed to be seen would show up for a few frames and glitch out.

        Turns out the cam system it came from uses some very proprietary codec. So the footage was effectively useless without their special sauce player/codec

        • MrFunnyMoustache@lemmy.ml
          2·
          11 months ago

          Sounds infuriating. I would have assumed most of these use h.264 because of how ubiquitous it is.

          I am guessing this is by design so when you really need it, you’ll use their software and need to pay to use it?

          • terminhell@lemmy.world
            2·
            11 months ago

            I guess. I tried everything within reason to play it. VLC, mpv, windows media player etc. all with various degrees of failure. Even went down a rabbit hole of trying codecs from websites that looked frozen in time from the late 90’s, as it was an old cam system.

      • Inktvip@lemm.ee
        4·
        11 months ago

        I’m working in live video and there’s a lot of proprietary codecs out there that vlc doesn’t play by default. Most of those are lossless/very high bitrate lossy formats designed to be encoded and decoded quickly for things like instant replays, so not something the average consumer would get their hands on.

    • BakedCatboy@lemmy.ml
      14·
      11 months ago

      I always use VLC so I thought the meme was that it was one of those fake “codec not supported, go to this sketchy website” videos

    • Cyclohexane@lemmy.mlOPM
      7·
      11 months ago

      I’ve only had this problem playing the video on TV directly. Like smart TV. Can I put VLC on there?

      I use jellyfin to do transcoding, but very occasionally it exhibits issues still.

      • DreamButt@lemmy.worldEnglish
        10·
        11 months ago

        Something I don’t see a lot of people do but totally should is get a really long HDMI cable and snake it around the room. You can then hook up a laptop or hell even your desktop directly to the TV. Think my cable is around 20 feet and I got it off Amazon for dirt cheap. Works wonders when I want to watch something on Plex (a lot of smart TV’s have trouble with Plex)

        • jws_shadotak@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          3·
          11 months ago

          I took a little ASROCK DeskMini and put a 5700G in it to serve as a media and light gaming station. My family uses it more than I do now.

          You could easily do this with a pi 5 or pi variant for cheap.

          • exscape@kbin.social
            6·
            11 months ago

            20 feet is fine unless you want 4K 120 Hz and stuff like that. I’m which case 20 feet may also be fine with a passive cable, but a bit on the edge of where AOC starts to make sense.

            As for 1080p and 4K30 I think 10 meters can work passively.

            Edit: My in-head unit conversion was a bit off, 20 feet is probably a bit over what’s sensible for 4K120. But it’s probably fine for non-UHS HDMI.

        • olutukko@lemmy.world
          2·
          11 months ago

          This! 10meter hdmi cable came in really handy in my last apartment for connecting pc to tv while having the cable completely hidden all thr time. Now I would need like 20m cable and I would have to drill it trough walls. Just laptop and chromecast now. It’s a bit sad that I cant just open any game on my tv without carrying the pc from another room

        • circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org
          1·
          11 months ago

          My gaming PC sits on the other side of the wall of my living room. I’ve got HDMI and USB going right through the wall. Wireless keyboard and mouse on the coffee table. It’s worked great for years, and for couch gaming I generally use a Steam Controller or DS4 in Bluetooth mode.

          My living room TV is smart but I don’t use any of those features and keep it disconnected from a network.

    • Veedem@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      11 months ago

      lol indeed. Love VLC on my AppleTV. Plays stuff the native app from my NAS won’t play.

    • kratoz29@lemm.eeEnglish
      2·
      11 months ago

      I recently downloaded some YouTube videos that my dad wanted to play through USB with his Android based projector, as it doesn’t have the PlayStore and the videos didn’t want to play (and I knew they worked fine on my mac) I went quickly to its store just to find out VLC wasn’t there, and I didn’t have time to sideload stuff (I didn’t even know if it was possible), hopefully there was FX File Explorer and that one comes with a video player which was able to save the day.

    • Souroak@lemmy.sdf.org
      1·
      11 months ago

      I remember a phase in my childhood where I could only get Realplayer to open some series of anime that I was into at the time that I had downloaded.

    • jeffw@lemmy.world
      1·
      11 months ago

      Beat me to it. I haven’t had an unsupported file error in the decade I’ve been using VLC. Maybe one time I had to download something to support a rare file type

    • Octopus1348@lemy.lol
      21·
      11 months ago

      And if you want to play on a TV that doesn’t support the format, convert it with FFMpeg.

      • KubeRoot@discuss.tchncs.de
        1·
        11 months ago

        I’ve had good experience using mkvtoolnix to mux video into an mkv with subtitles included. Not sure if mkv support is widespread, but as janky as the TV was with other formats, mkv worked great every time.

      • Land_Strider@lemmy.world
        3·
        11 months ago

        Installing MPC-HC during K-Lite Code pack as my primary media player has taken place of VLC for me this last year. I have been using VLC as music player only with some Winamp-like no-viewport UI lately.

        • PraiseTheSoup@lemm.ee
          3·
          11 months ago

          Been using both MPC-HC and VLC for years now. Between the two of them there is no file that you cannot play.

    • Da_Boom@iusearchlinux.fyiEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      VLC works most of the time. That said some videos VLC can’t seem to decode correctly - I never get VLC complaining about unsupported file formats, but I do get weird artifacts and glitched rendering when I try to play certain ones.

      It’s then that I usually try MPV or MPlayer. One of those will usually play the video correctly.

  • milkytoast@kbin.social
    26·
    11 months ago

    where the fuck are u getting ur movies??? I’ve only ever seen mp4 and mkv, all of which even windows media player handles I think

  • Dagnet@lemmy.world
    22·
    11 months ago

    And then you have mpv that will play anything ever, even a .txt with “interesting movie” written in it

    • Pantherina@feddit.de
      1·
      11 months ago

      Any Player will not be able to decode some files if they are downloaded in pieces and not even the header data is complete.

      • Turun@feddit.de
        1·
        11 months ago

        It depends, there are decent chances you’ll get the video to play from the next I frame onwards.

  • Andrew@mander.xyz
    14·
    11 months ago

    Average Windows user.

    BTW, IEC units are superior and accepted unlike the SI units, so the correct usage is “2.5 GiB”.

  • normalexit@lemmy.world
    12·
    11 months ago

    This reminded me of having to install a codec pack like klite or cccp as one of the first things on a fresh install. I’m glad that isn’t a thing anymore.