Video Reader: Failed to initialize internal resources

I am trying to read an MP4 video file from a GoPro camera.

The following error shows up when using VideoReader...

v = VideoReader(fullfile(files(ia).folder,files(ia).name));
Error using VideoReader/initReader
Failed to initialize internal resources.

Error in audiovideo.internal.IVideoReader (line 136)
            initReader(obj, fileName, currentTime);

Error in VideoReader (line 104)
            [e-mail](varargin{:});

The video codec is MPEG-H Part2/HEVC (H.265) (hcv1)

The audio codec is MPEG AAC Audio (mp4a)

I looked at the supported formats and notice that they mention "MPEG-4, including H.264".

My guess is that H.265 unsupported? Can anyone confirm?

The audio codec appears to be supported.

The video plays on VLC so I assume I have the codec installed.

I am using Windows 10 Enterprise 22H2, Matlab 2022a

Is there anything that can be done to get VideoReader to work with this file?

Answer 1

[Deep]

Yeah, it seems that H.265 is unsupported for this. You can use ffmpeg to convert it to H.264 for your task.

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vcodec libx264 output.mp4

If you want to do it from MATLAB, there's ffmpeg toolbox. I'd suggest looking into its usage and then using VideoReader on the converted file.

[Robert Daly]

@Deep thanks for the tip about ffmpeg for changing the codec.

I gave it a test and the file it produced worked as expected with VideoReader.

I had a look at the matlab toolbox but since it seemed I had to download the .exe anyway I just cobbled together a powershell script to run through all of the files.

cd "V:\Video Drops\2023-07-03\GoPro"
$Files = Get-ChildItem -path ".\" -filter *.mp4 -file -ErrorAction silentlycontinue -recurse
foreach ($f in $Files){
    & "V:\Instrument Software\Video\ffmpeg-6.0-essentials_build\bin\ffmpeg.exe" -i $f -vcodec libx264 (".\Matlab\"+$f)
}

So far so good...