Nov 22 2012

Dealing with FFMPEG Error while opening codec for output stream…

By • FFMPEG, VLC • 1 • Tags: , , ,

This specific content was written 11 years ago. Please keep this in mind as it may be outdated and not adhering to best-practices.

Quick post about the ffmpeg error message: “Error while opening codec for output stream #0.0 – maybe incorrect parameters such as bit_rate, rate, width or height” .

We received some video files from a partner in the Safecity project, which did not play in all media players.
We tried VLC, windows media player, and a variety of other players but nothing worked.

Checking the file with a hex editor, I saw there was data within the video, and thought to try converting with FFMPEG using commands such as:

ffmpeg -i “damaged_file.avi” converted_file.mp4

However, ffmpeg  failed with the following error message:

Error while opening codec for output stream #0.0 – maybe incorrect parameters such as bit_rate, rate, width or height

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