Outdated players only support yuv420p mpeg2video

[xnejp03]

It seems that for some time now (for about 6 months) FFmpeg cannot produce a valid mpeg2video file from mjpeg source. The result plays correctly in ffplay and VLC but shows only large pink-ish pixels on some TVs (reproduced on Sony and Panasonic). This use to work before.

ffmpeg -v 9 -loglevel 99 -i mjpeg.AVI -c:v mpeg2video -c:a mp2 -f mpegts d:\tmp\out.mpg

This is reproducible with pretty much any mjpeg videos.

[Carl Eugen Hoyos]

Please provide an input file.

[xnejp03]

Uploaded file mjpeg_pink_artifacts.avi to the FTP

[Carl Eugen Hoyos]

Please test the following:

$ ffmpeg -i mjpeg_pink_artifacts.avi -vcodec mpeg2video -pix_fmt yuv420p -vb 800k out.mpg

or

$ ffmpeg -mjpeg_pink_artifacts.avi -vb 800k out.mpg

(The bitrate setting is there only because I think the default is slightly to small, it will also work without, producing bad quality output.)

I will copy e4f5aa5e for this use case if nobody beats me.

[xnejp03]

Yes, that fixes it. So shall I add this option to all my commands where target is mpeg2video (just to stay on the safe side)?

[Carl Eugen Hoyos]

Replying to xnejp03:

Yes, that fixes it. So shall I add this option to all my commands where target is mpeg2video (just to stay on the safe side)?

Only to the ones where quality loss is no problem / where you need compatibility with outdated players. ffmpeg by default tries to keep as much information (quality) as possible, if you need a different behaviour, you have to specify the output pixel format you want.

[Carl Eugen Hoyos]

A warning is printed since 47f9a5b.