Change FourCC setting in Linux Using Mencoder

Sometimes an AVI video file will not play on my PS3, resulting in a "data type not supported" error message. I finally figured out the problem this time. It wasn't audio codec, and it wasn't the weird fps it had; It was a FourCC setting that was incompatible. I tried using cfourcc to do this, but it did not result in playable AVI files. So, I tried mencoder and it worked fine, all without remuxing.

mencoder <input-file> -oac copy -ovc copy -ffourcc XVID -o <output-file>

-oac stands for "output audio codec"
-ovc stands for "output video codec"
-ffourcc is for forcing the changing of the fourcc setting. The non-playable files had a FourCC setting of FMP4. I changed it to XVID, which made them playable.
-o is for output file

Example:

mencoder The.Big.Show.S01E03.avi -oac copy -ovc copy -ffourcc XVID -o The.Big.Show.S01E03-XVID.avi

Removing Subtitles With MKVMerge

If you have subtitles in an MKV file that you want gone, you don't have to re-encode the whole thing. Simply open in MKVMerge, choose the track you want to remove (the text track if you want to remove subtitles), uncheck it, and remux. It'll take a few seconds and won't re-encode everything else. While there, you may want to make sure Compression is set to "none" explicitly on the extra options tab for each track to ensure maximum compatibility with things such as PS3, etc.

Making Compatible MKVs with MKVMerge

The following tip is from StephenB on the netgear forums. It helped me a lot. Thanks, Stephen.

Original Thread Title: Re: No sound on .MKV files , increasing in frequency.

It is the Muxing mode : Header stripping. This is also called "header compression". Though it doesn't save enough space to matter.

For some reason the Matroska developers made this mode the default earlier this summer. It doesn't work with most hardware players (including the EVA and also the WD Live).

You have to re-process the files to remove the header compression. This doesn't hurt the quality at all, and is a pretty fast operation. If you are comfortable running command line tools, you can either use mkWDclean.exe (found at https://sourceforge.net/projects/mat...7.zip/download) or MKVMerge (found at http://www.videohelp.com/tools/mkvtoolnix)

The command line strings are:

mkWDclean input.mkv output.mkv
mkvmerge -o output.mkv --compression -1:none input.mkv

There are two other ways that don't require opening a command line shell:

(a) You can use MKVMerge GUI, but it is tedious. You select every track (from the middle pane), select the "extra options" tab, and set user defined options to "--compression -1:none". (blank is not good enough).

(b) You can download VID2EVA from http://vid2eva.lefti.net. This is a freeware video conversion tool that I've put together. After installation you right click on the MKV and select "VID2EVA" then "transcode audio". For this particular file, it won't transcode since the audio is already AC3. But it will remove the header compression.