The VideoLAN Forums

I've been transcoding a lot of .wmv files (Windows Media Video and Audio 9) into .mov files (h.264 and mp4a), without any incident so far.

However, I have one file that seems to cause VLC to stall right at the end; the file appears finished (it's the size I would expect, about 150mb) but VLC is still doing something with it, utilising 100% of one core (normally during transcoding it uses all , so it seems like it's trying to finish off the file or such, however it never gets anywhere, and the file doesn't appear as a valid .mov (Quicktime won't open it). I haven't had this problem with any of the other files (all the same audio and video codecs).

Opening the message window gives me: And it just does this in an infinite loop. It seems suspiciously like an unexpected end to the source file, but why is VLC not just stopping where it is and finishing the file? I've tried different transcoding options, but it seems to be file reading that's causing the issue.
It's worth noting that while I can open error and message windows, VLC is unresponsive, so it isn't possible to halt the transcoding operation, or even quite the program without force-quitting.

The following is a sample taken in Activity Monitor, sorry for the huge text-all but we don't seem to be able to attach even text files here
I had to remove the binary images section to get this to fit, let me know if it's needed and I can post it separately!

Have your tried to see whether Handbrake fairs any better (it uses VLC)? The main difference is that it will use an MPEG4 container for the resultant videos, with the H264 and AAC codecs.

As a 5c, one advantage of the MPEG4 container, as opposed to MOV, is that you can use the videos even in places that Quicktime is not available. I haven't kept up to date on the advantages that the MOV container might provide admittedly.

Hmm, well I seem to have managed to encode the video through Handbrake, thanks for the idea!

Still baffles me though, as I tried .mp4 through VLC to no avail, but in Handbrake it worked without any apparent issue. I've no particular preference for .mov, it's just what I tend to use because Quicktime's my default movie player, even in spite of its various oddities.

I haven't really spent much time trying to understand why Handbrake works in cases that VLC fails via the UI, even though Handbrake uses VLC.

BTW Quicktime X handles MP4 without any issues and is usually the default player for MP4.