Fixing an AVI index with mencoder

 Fixing an AVI index with mencoder

Fixing an AVI index with mencoder
This is more a “note to self”, but I’m sure others find it useful as well.

Quite often I run across AVI files with a broken index. That index is used in media players to seek rapidly in the movie file. Without an index or with a corrupt index, seeking either does not work at all or takes a long time.

mencoder, which is available on almost any platform, allows you to massage AVI files besides tons of other operations on a never-ending list of video formats.

Here’s the command to repair a broken AVI index (I used the mplayer/mencoder version that comes with the FreeBSD ports collection):

$ mencoder -idx in.avi -ovc copy -oac copy -o out.avi