Onlydarksets

I got a Creative Vado HD for Christmas, and, for what it is, it’s great.  It’s compact, takes decent video at high resolution (720p), and it is easy to use.

However, I recently tried playing back some of the videos on the SageTV HD-100 extender (doesn’t this thing seem to be at the root of all of my problems?), and it failed.  Miserably.  There was no audio, and the video froze after 5-10 seconds.

I figured there must be something funky going on with the audio codec. Creative’s website, of course, doesn’t tell you what codec is used for the audio.  MediaInfo to the rescue.

It turns out it uses the ADPCM WAV audio codec.  And, of course, the HD-100 doesn’t support WAV (it’s a chipset issue, I believe).

The fix is, theoretically, pretty simple – pull out the audio, convert it to a format that, you know, anyone actually uses anymore, and mux it back in.  However, I want something that will do this all in one step, via the command line.  Luckily, Avidemux can do it.

I created a batch file with the following:
"C:\Program Files\Avidemux 2.4\avidemux2_cli.exe" --force-alt-h264 --load %1 --video-codec COPY --audio-codec MP3 --audio-bitrate 128 --output-format AVI --save "%~1 (remux).avi"
This loads the source file, copies the video stream, converts the audio stream to MP3, puts it all into an AVI container, and saves it to a new file (the –force-alt-h264 is necessary in order to avoid a prompt in the command line output; it has to be before the –load argument).  Every time I put a file on the server, it runs this.  Every now and then I go in and verify that the files converted properly, and then I manually delete the originals.

Postscript: yes, you can use AAC and put it into an MP4 container.  However, it won’t play on anything Apple, because the AVC profile used by the Vado uses CABAC.  I can’t tell you exactly what CABAC is, but I can tell you that Quicktime doesn’t like it.  I think I read that Apple TV doesn’t like it either, but I don’t recall.  iPods don’t like CABAC either, but the resolution is too high, so it’s a non-issue here.