• Hackworth@piefed.ca
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    2 days ago

    I get the sense that VLC doesn’t really care if something is a valid video file, it’s just gonna start playing and see what happens.

    • catshit_dogfart@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      I’m pretty sure it can still do that. Like if you can trick it into playing something that isn’t even video, it’ll shit out whatever it can interpret as video. Which of course will be garbled nonsense, but it did exactly what you asked.

      • Derpenheim@lemmy.zip
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        2 days ago

        I wish every program was this way. Fuck off with your file format restrictions, I know what Im doing

      • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org
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        1 day ago

        My camera shat out an MP4 without a moov atom and VLC nor anything else could play it :( Not even when inserted in the middle of a valid file of the same format.

        Yes, ffplay can interpret it as rawvideo when asked but so can it /dev/random

          • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org
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            1 day ago

            MP4 is decent at this, it’s the camera’s fault for writing critical information at the end and not retrying on SD write errors. A bad couple of frames is still preferrable to losing up to 20 minutes (yes, that’s the split size, and it loses 5 seconds in between).

      • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        Which of course will be garbled nonsense, but it did exactly what you asked.

        Is it possible that someone took a copy of hitlers book, shoved it into VLC, took the video it spit out, and somehow we got a president from that process? Garbled nonsense. Highly racist. But it did what you asked!

        Wait…does this explain Mark Zuckerberg? They put a piece of cellery, mixed with dog shit, and out comes Mark Zuckerberg who’s almost a real boy?

    • MelodiousFunk@slrpnk.net
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      2 days ago

      I recall a few AVIs from the long ago that VLC would throw an error on, something about a format error, and it gave the option to try converting it or try playing as-is. Attempting to convert took forever, and playback was mostly fine, though IIRC you couldn’t scrub through the file.

      • Harvey656@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        Yeah it absolutely can fix broken avi files! Was a lifesaver back in high-school for me, during that era, avi was every camcorder format (at least that I had).

        I always stored it on this 128gb external drive and I swear that drive was cursed, always corrupted my files. Vlc was an easy way to fix them for class.

      • zurohki@aussie.zone
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        2 days ago

        IIRC that’s AVI files that aren’t indexed properly. VLC could either build its own index for the file or it could just start playing the file one frame at a time and hope for the best.

    • SorryQuick@lemmy.ca
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      2 days ago

      But really isn’t that just libavcodec behaving like that? VLC itself doesn’t actually read your video file, it just takes what FFMPEG gives it and blindly trusts it.