Happened to me a few months ago. Had a ticket for our District Attorney office, trying to playback a security camera footage from a parking lot or something. It would open, but, the person that was supposed to be seen would show up for a few frames and glitch out.

Turns out the cam system it came from uses some very proprietary codec. So the footage was effectively useless without their special sauce player/codec

[–] MrFunnyMoustache@lemmy.ml 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Sounds infuriating. I would have assumed most of these use h.264 because of how ubiquitous it is.

I am guessing this is by design so when you really need it, you'll use their software and need to pay to use it?

[–] terminhell@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago

I guess. I tried everything within reason to play it. VLC, mpv, windows media player etc. all with various degrees of failure. Even went down a rabbit hole of trying codecs from websites that looked frozen in time from the late 90's, as it was an old cam system.

[–] bus_factor@lemmy.world 10 points 10 months ago

I can! Happened all the time 20 years ago. Since then, no.

[–] KnightontheSun@lemmy.world 9 points 10 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

[deleted]

[–] Inktvip@lemm.ee 4 points 10 months ago

I'm working in live video and there's a lot of proprietary codecs out there that vlc doesn't play by default. Most of those are lossless/very high bitrate lossy formats designed to be encoded and decoded quickly for things like instant replays, so not something the average consumer would get their hands on.

[–] NotATurtle@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 10 months ago

My smart tv refuses to work with .mkv so it happens regularly for me.