Würgspaß's questions

I took a video with my Android phone but failed to press the Stop button properly. So my phone ran out of disk memory and the Video App probably just cut off the file.

After copying the file (size 2.1 GB) to my ubuntu desktop I tried to run it with mplayer. The output is:

MPlayer 1.2.1 (Debian), built with gcc-5.4.0 (C) 2000-2016 MPlayer Team
mplayer: could not connect to socket
mplayer: No such file or directory
Failed to open LIRC support. You will not be able to use your remote control.

Playing 20190215_141432.mp4.
libavformat version 56.40.101 (external)
libavformat file format detected.
[mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2 @ 0x7f0685aced80]Protocol name not provided, cannot determine if input is local or a network protocol, buffers and access patterns cannot be configured optimally without knowing the protocol
[mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2 @ 0x7f0685aced80]Could not find codec parameters for stream 0 (Video: h264 (avc1 / 0x31637661), none(tv, bt709), 1920x1080): unspecified pixel format
Consider increasing the value for the 'analyzeduration' and 'probesize' options
LAVF_header: av_find_stream_info() failed
[lavf] stream 0: video (h264), -vid 0
VIDEO:  [H264]  1920x1080  24bpp  90000.000 fps    0.0 kbps ( 0.0 kbyte/s)
Clip info:
 major_brand: mp42
 minor_version: 0
 compatible_brands: isommp42
 creation_time: 2019-02-15 14:06:39
Load subtitles in ./
Failed to open VDPAU backend libvdpau_va_gl.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
[vdpau] Error when calling vdp_device_create_x11: 1
==========================================================================
Opening video decoder: [ffmpeg] FFmpeg's libavcodec codec family
libavcodec version 56.60.100 (external)
Selected video codec: [ffh264] vfm: ffmpeg (FFmpeg H.264)
==========================================================================
Audio: no sound
Starting playback...
V:   0.0   0/  0 ??% ??% ??,?% 0 0 


Exiting... (End of file)

Is there any way to fix this? Maybe there is just some meta-data which needs to be corrected.

I also tried this but output is the same:

mplayer -lavfdopts analyzeduration=120 20190215_141432.mp4

Then I tried to cut the video

ffmpeg -probesize 1000M -analyzeduration 1000M 
    -i 20190215_141432.mp4 -pix_fmt yuvj420p 
    -ss 00:00:00 -c copy -t 00:05:30 new.mp4 

But the output is about the same:

ffmpeg version 2.8.15-0ubuntu0.16.04.1 Copyright (c) 2000-2018 the FFmpeg developers
  built with gcc 5.4.0 (Ubuntu 5.4.0-6ubuntu1~16.04.10) 20160609
[...]
[mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2 @ 0x182d380] Could not find codec parameters for stream 0 (Video: h264 (avc1 / 0x31637661), none(tv, bt709), 1920x1080): unspecified pixel format
Consider increasing the value for the 'analyzeduration' and 'probesize' options
20190215_141432.mp4: could not find codec parameters
Input #0, mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2, from '20190215_141432.mp4':
  Metadata:
    major_brand     : mp42
    minor_version   : 0
    compatible_brands: isommp42
    creation_time   : 2019-02-15 12:06:39
  Duration: 00:19:49.40, bitrate: 10308 kb/s
    Stream #0:0(eng): Video: h264 (avc1 / 0x31637661), none(tv, bt709), 1920x1080, SAR 1:1 DAR 16:9, 10.94 fps, 90k tbr, 90k tbn, 180k tbc (default)
    Metadata:
      rotate          : 180
      creation_time   : 2019-02-15 12:06:39
      handler_name    : VideoHandle
    Side data:
      displaymatrix: rotation of -180.00 degrees
[...]
video:0kB audio:0kB subtitle:0kB other streams:0kB global headers:0kB muxing overhead: unknown
Output file is empty, nothing was encoded (check -ss / -t / -frames parameters if used)

Pls note that I specified the pix_fmt, probesize and analyzeduration but got as reply

unspecified pixel format. Consider increasing the value for the 'analyzeduration' and 'probesize' options

Btw: I tried pixel_format also.

My final attemp, so far, has been to use untrunc. The output is:

Repair: 20190215_141432.mp4
Failed to parse atoms in truncated file

Update on (edited) answer (by Fabby):

I tried this

ffmpeg  -i 20190215_141432.mp4 -probesize 100M -analyzeduration 100M -map_metadata -1 -c:v libx264 -strict -2 -c:a libmp3lame -b:a 512K new.mkv

(and played around with values like 1024M, 2G, 4G and placing of parameters (as suggested in here) but output is essentially:

[mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2 @ 0xc0c4a0] Could not find codec parameters for stream 0 (Video: h264 (avc1 / 0x31637661), none(tv, bt709), 1920x1080): unspecified pixel format
Consider increasing the value for the 'analyzeduration' and 'probesize' options
20190215_141432.mp4: could not find codec parameters
[...]
Codec AVOption b (set bitrate (in bits/s)) specified for output file #0 (new.mkv) has not been used for any stream. The most likely reason is either wrong type (e.g. a video option with no video streams) or that it is a private option of some encoder which was not actually used for any stream.
[...]
[buffer @ 0xc137e0] Unable to parse option value "-1" as pixel format
    Last message repeated 1 times
[buffer @ 0xc137e0] Error setting option pix_fmt to value -1.
[graph 0 input from stream 0:0 @ 0xc133e0] Error applying options to the filter.
Error opening filters!

I am going to lay this question to rest, now.

Reasons: It is dead simpe to cut videos, join videos - even roatate videos using ffmpeg/mencoder or other tools. Cutting, joining, rotating actions should (according to my understanding) re-arrange meta-data in the first place.

I this case, meta-data is there and valid (such as duration, format, creation time...). So, why is repairing meta-data in this case that difficult? Extremely annoying is commands output, claiming that pixel format would not have been specified and so on....

After all. I thought repairing this video just needs a valuable hint or some magic canonical tool but after all, my life doesn't depend on it.

I tried to concatenate some mp4 videos using mencoder like this:

mencoder -ovc copy -oac pcm P10408*.mp4 -o new.mp4

When trying to play the new video I was asked to install some additional decoder ITU H.264 Of course, I could install it but on the other hand manpage for mencoder claims that -ovc copy just copies the original without re-encoding.

So, apparently -ovc copy changed the format of the original mp4 (which I can replay without that H.264 decoder).

I also tried -ovc raw -vf format=mp4 which generates a file I can replay without problems but is blown up to 10 GB (oroiginal files in sum are about 200 MB).

And I tried -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4 which generates a file I can replay without problems but lacks in video quality.

By the way, concatenating .mov files with -ovc copy produces a new file I can replay without problem.

Question:

Is there a way to use -ovc copy to produce a new file of the same format as the original files?

After reading about how to convert a video by 90 degrees

I tried these commands:

mencoder old.mp4 -oac lavc -ovc x264 vcodec=mpeg4 -vf flip,mirror -o new.mp4

mencoder old.mp4 -oac lavc -ovc x264 vcodec=mpeg4 -vf rotate=2 -o new.mp4

ffmpeg -i old.mp4 -vf "hflip" -strict -2 new.mp4 

but the converted video is still upside down.

Running the video with

mplayer -vf flip,mirror  old.mp4

renders it as desired. But anyway, I'd like to convert it.

I'm using ffmpeg version 2.8.15-0ubuntu0.16.04.1 and MEncoder 1.2.1 (Debian), built with gcc-5.3.1