Making WMV (and other unruly) files behave in NicePlayer

[Tommy_B]

Sincere apologies for my hit and run a few months and hijacking
Håvard's post - and sorry the delay in actually posting something of
substance.

Håvard, I believe the root of your problem may be in the fact that
Flip4Mac is used in both the Quicktime and CoreVideo rendering kits -
but if I am not mistaken, it's only meant by its developers to play
100% nicely with Quicktime.

The reason Movist and VLC play your movies with no issue is because
Movist uses FFMPEG (in addition to Quicktime) as does VLC to playback
WMV files.

But there is a solution... actually two that I can verify.

**These solutions will also solve the most irritating problem of
having to wait - sometimes 10-20 minutes for long files - for an
entire WMV file to load into the player before the seek (fast forward)
function works properly.***

Unfortunately, none of them involve direct, immediate playback of a
file in the process of being downloaded; the entire WMV file must
first be downloaded before these processes can occur.

1. Jay Tuley's the man again, you could use WOV Suite
http://code.google.com/p/wovsuite/
WOV - wrapper of video. Download the suite which contains two apps,
choose your WMV file, right click on it, choose "Open With", and
navigate to the first app, WOVConverter, and let it work it's magic.

It'll spit out a file with your WMV's name but a .wov extension. If
you right click on it, you'll see it's a package actually and inside
you'll see the WMV file and a small .mov file - what Jay has done is
basically create a mechanism that makes a hinted movie that delivers
all the meta data of the WMV file right at the start so there's no
need to wait for the entire thing to load. Which solves resolutions
problems that Flip4Mac won't handle outside of Quicktime proper as
well as having to wait for the entire file to load before being able
to use the seek function.

This format, at least in my tests, always displayed the file at the
intended resolution; there were no discrepancies between intended
resolution and displayed resolution in CoreVideo, EXCEPT in the case
where the video was smaller than the default NicePlayer screen, which,
doesn't get any smaller than 240 x 160. But at that size, we're
talking movies made for mobile devices so this shouldn't impact anyone
too much.

And seeking within the file was available immediately upon opening
the .wov converted file. (To view a .wov, right click, choose "Open
With" and navigate to "WOVOpener" and follow the intuitive menus.)

I tested WOV on 10.6.4 and both PPC & Intel 10.5.8 and it works as
expected on each platform.

2. The other way, if you have QuicktimePro or something comparable, is
to simply do a "Save As" once the WMV file is completely loaded, which
avoids the WMV watermark because the codecs of the file are not being
converted, the movie is just being stored in a different file
container (.mov). You'll likely see a message like "Flattening
movie..." which is good because that means you'll have instant start
and seek functionality and no dimensions problems. Please note: this
only works with no Flip4Mac watermark using the Save As function...
exporting the video would involving transcoding it and then Flip4Mac
would slap their watermark on your exported movie.