Re: [gentoo-user] convert wmv to mp4?

[Paul Hartman <paul.hartman+gentoo@gmail.com>]

On Tue, May 1, 2012 at 5:14 PM, Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, May 1, 2012 at 2:41 PM, Paul Hartman
> <paul.hartman+gentoo@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Tue, May 1, 2012 at 3:51 PM, Michael Mol <mikemol@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Tue, May 1, 2012 at 4:46 PM, Paul Hartman
>>> <paul.hartman+gentoo@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> On Tue, May 1, 2012 at 2:56 PM, Neil Bothwick <neil@digimed.co.uk> wrote:
>>>>> On Tue, 1 May 2012 12:30:11 -0700, Mark Knecht wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> Notice the (-win32codecs) flag. Seems to me (on this system anyway)
>>>>>> they are hard masked off? I tried adding the flag to package.use but
>>>>>> emerge won't enable the darn thing...
>>>>>
>>>>> You need to unmask the USE flag first, by adding -win32codecs
>>>>> to /etc/portage/profile/use.mask
>>>>
>>>> If he is using amd64 he can't use win32codecs unless he uses a 32-bit
>>>> mplayer/ffmpeg. AFAIK.
>>>
>>> Wouldn't using multilib work around this?
>>
>> I think he would still need to compile a 32-bit mplayer/ffmpeg (in a
>> 32-bit chroot) to be able to make use of them. Multilib would let him
>> run 32-bit mplayer or ffmpeg binaries (which themselves would be able
>> to use the 32-bit DLLs). But I don't think 64-bit mplayer/ffmpeg can
>> call 32-bit DLLs.
>>
>> There is an amd64codecs package containing the 64-bit codecs, but it
>> has been masked and made obsolete by the fact that mplayer/ffmpeg can
>> natively do most (or all?) of those codecs these days.
>>
>
> And presumably for all the same reasons, if I cannot play them I
> cannot convert them.
>
> Ah, a world full of unspecified, proprietary vendor specific file
> formats hidden in old dlls... Ain't it a fine world we live in?
>
> Sort of painful to start maintaining a 32-bit chroot just to handle
> this sort of thing. I suspect there's some freeware for the Windows
> world that might allow me to do the conversion in a VM. I'll start
> looking for that. The web site that advertised conversion didn't work
> as it bombed out after an hour.

There used to be a 32-bit mplayer-bin package in portage that would
have made it simple, but that disappeared some time ago.

> Maybe there's some simple binary install I could do - Fedora or
> Ubuntu, etc. - but my concern there is that those binaries might not
> play well inside my 64-bit Gentoo environ...

If you can find a statically-linked 32-bit mplayer somewhere, and
emerge the win32codecs package on your machine, I think it has a
chance of working.