John,

I'm surprised mtvp plays the result of concatenating two MPEG files,
but I don't really know much about the MPEG file format. Perhaps
mtvp was extended to read concatenating MPEG files since it's so
much in the Unix style to do that. It would be interesting to see if
the resulting file would play under, say, the Windows Media Player
or Quicktime.

If this is a bug in the Squeak MPEG primitives, it's really an issue
with the library itself, which is written in C and simply glued in
by John McIntosh. I think it's unlikely that anyone on the Squeak
list will want to dive into this library to fix it. (Although if anyone
does, there are some other MPEG library bugs I'd love to see fixed!)

A different approach to manipulating movies would be to convert
both movies to Squeak JPEG movies, then write a concatention program
in Squeak to paste them together. If you've got a utility that can convert
a directory full of frames into an MPEG movie, you could even write
some Squeak code to dump out the frames of the JPEG movie and
get an MPEG movie back. The long way around, perhaps, but you
can write it all in Squeak.

In any case, good luck!

	-- John


At 6:22 AM +0000 12/19/01, John Hinsley wrote:
>Can anyone duplicate (or maybe even explain) this:
>
>Get two mpeg files. See if they run OK in Squeak's mpeg player.
>
>Join them together with cat (cat file2.mpeg>>file1.mpeg )
>
>Open them with (say) mtvp (a popular free *nix movie player).
>
>They (it) runs, right?
>
>Now try and play it with Squeak's mpeg movie player (the blue one). 
>
>On my system, Squeak locks completely. It's still on the system, the
>system doesn't recognise it as a zombie, but it's completely and utterly
>unreactive. 
>
>Any idea what's happening? Are there two headers in there with Squeak
>trying to read both?
>
>No debugging info is available through the usual channels (Squeak's
>locked up and the debug log shows nothing).