MP4 video clips don't play

Technical questions and support
#1

Hi, longtime Ableton user here. Recently discovered Ebosuite and I absolutely love it. The possibilities are pretty mind blowing.

I’m familiarizing myself with the video codecs etc. I noticed that I can only get video clips to play (using eClips) if I convert them first with the eConvert plugin. The downside of using that is that the output files are massive. In this instance it turned a 40MB MP4 file into a 1 gig MOV file. When I convert a video to HAP using AVF Exporter, the output file is not much bigger than the original file, but it doesn’t play in Ableton. The same happens if I try to play the original MP4 file directly. Only the very first frame, and then it freezes. The huge difference in file size makes me think I may be doing something wrong with the AVF Exporter.

Thoughts? Thanks!

#2

Okay, I have figured out the AVF Convertor part. I was selecting the wrong codec.

So my only question left I suppose is that if it’s correct that MP4 files do not play at all beyond the first frame?

#3

create an eclip track put the mp4 into the empty clip slot.
go to the bottom of ableton where you can see the waveform - navagate to the clip box and hit the save button. see if that works

4bk8ynwwo1k51

2 Likes
#4

That doesn’t change anything… still only the very first frame that moves, then it stops.

#5

I noticed that the audio layer plays fine of these files.

#6

try re encoding your mp4 to mp4 again and see if that does the trick . sometimes i get odd glitches with some codecs .

#7

Hi @Nicolay,

could you send us the file that causes you issues? you can wetransfer it to support@ebosuite.com

About HAP vs MP4 - Hap is way better than mp4 for fast triggering, but the cost of that is the big file size.

HAP is the preferred codec in the visual communities because it’s fast to decompress, while file sizes are easier to manage with larger hard disks.

The problem with MP4(h264) kinds of codecs is that sometimes, in order to decompress frame nr. 8, they need to first decompress frames 5,6,7 and even 9 and 10.
So it’s kinda similar to granular audio: it needs to sample a lot around requested time point to produce output sample. This gets heavy on the CPU/HW decoder and bus that needs to copy all that data within the computer many many times.

Hap(or ProRes) in this regard are more like .wav/.aiff file where all samples are ordered and independent, while mp4 is, guess what - like mp3:)

cheers,
nesa