Create thumbnails from a flv video on FC7

[sladmin]

Hi,

I am running VLC player, 0.8.6f Janus version on Fedora Core 7 (dedicated server environment) to extract an image from the flv video. For certain flv files (I donot know what is their characteristic!), the vlc player generates the desired thumbnail but for certain flv files, it gives an error:
[flv @ 0xbb2314] Unsupported audio codec format (ffffffff)
[flv@ 0xbb2314] unsupported video codec format (ffffffff)
[flv@ 0xbb2314] unsupported audio codec (5)
[00000336] ffmpeg demuxer error: Seeking too far: EOF
[00000414] main decoder error: no suitable decoder module for fourcc 'undf'

and then quits the executable. The thumbnail for the video is not being generated. The command being used is following:

vlc -V image --start-time 0 --stop-time 1 --image-out-format jpg --image-out-ratio 24 --image-out-prefix snap test.mpg vlc:quit

A few more observations on this server:
a. ffmpeg is able to convert the same flv to mpg format. I could generated thumbnail using this command from the mpg file.
b. The same version of vlc player and this flv file works well on the Windows install. Thumbnail is being generated for the same set of software pieces.
c. There is no X11/sound card support on this server..this is a dedicated server running environment with Fedora Core 7 installed.

Do I need to have some sort of flv plugins on this server? Since this is a server environment, there is no browser installed on this machine. Is this required?

Any help/pointers in resolving this issue is deeply appreciated!

Thanks!

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

did you build your VLC on the same version of ffmpeg?

[sladmin]

I installed vlc and ffmpeg using the installer utility yum on fedora. Do you think I should download the ffmpeg and vlc source code and compile them on the machine? How can I check which version of ffmpeg libraries is being used by vlc in this install?

[sladmin]

Hi,

I have tried compiling the latest source code on FC7, with building extras/contrib. Now if I run the command to generate thumbnail from the flv video, I am getting the following error:

./vlc -V image --start-time 0 --stop-time 1 --image-out-format jpg --image-out-ratio 24 --image-out-prefix snap intro_16_05_2008_09_39_22_642561.flv vlc:quit
VLC media player 0.9.0-git Grishenko
[00000001] main libvlc debug: VLC media player - version 0.9.0-git Grishenko - (c) 1996-2008 the VideoLAN team
[00000001] main libvlc debug: libvlc was configured with ./configure '--disable-glx' '--disable-bonjour'
[00000001] main libvlc debug: translation test: code is "C"
[00000001] main libvlc: Running vlc with the default interface. Use 'cvlc' to use vlc without interface.
Remote control interface initialized. Type `help' for help.
[00000421] oss audio output error: cannot open audio device (/dev/dsp)
[00000466] freetype filter error: failed to load font file /usr/share/fonts/truetype/freefont/FreeSerifBold.ttf
[00000470] access_directory access error: vlc:quit: No such file or directory
[00000470] access_file access error: cannot open file vlc:quit (No such file or directory)
[00000468] main input error: open of `vlc:quit' failed: could not create access: no suitable access module
[00000463] main subpicture error: object is not attached

Pls suggest what is missing here.

[kwizart]

Note that since Fedora 8; there is a vlc-core package from livna that doesn't need Xorg libs to be installed.
Now flv seems to have a problem with F-9 (works with F-8). But i hope to have it solved as soon as vlc-0.8.6h is officially released.

Now it would be better to take the src.rpm if you want to tweak you own vlc package. That will save you from lot of errors and duplicate works.