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
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      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
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        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
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          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
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      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.