Registax 4 Will Not Open my AVI Files (on Linux)

[Randy Merritt (Randy)]

This may be old news for many to this forum but after spending several hours reading forums and blogs across 14(!) tabs in Firefox trying to find out why RegiStax 4 refused to input my AVI webcam file (even a small one:~!5MB) I’ve managed to solve the problem, and it never occurred to me that a Windows emulator would be the root cause (will we ever be rid of Windows?!). In my travels over the Web to try and find further info on this RegisStax failure I came across the notes from Ken Hough at http://www.astronomie.be/registax/linux.html that contained the key (in my case) comment:

“wine REQUIRES that AVI files are recorded as RGB. If a YUV encoded file is presented, an error message will be given that will include:

"Failed to start AVI decompression"

I’m running RegiStax under wine on Scientific Linux/KDE. For those of you running RegiStax natively under Windows you may not run nto this but for those who are trying to do it under Linux your frustration is borne from the unobvious -- Windows emulation (Bill Gates final revenge on Linux!?) For anyone new to webcam and RegiStax that may be running into this same message, I offer my notes below:


VirtualDub Notes
-------------------

Main Window
--------------
o File | Load Processing Settings...
- Video | Direct Stream Copy
- Audio | No Audio

o File | Capture AVI...


File Capture Window
----------------------
o File | Set Capture File...
o Video | Set custom format...
- Frame size -- 320 x 240, Data format -- 24-bit RGB[1]
o do the capture


After Capture
---------------
o File | Open video file...
o File | Save old format AVI... (select new, separate file)
[it is this separate file that is input to RegiStax]

exit VirtualDub


[1] it is Wine that limits avi files to RGB only!
Frame size depends on camera -- experiment


In the interest of making this process more robust and easier for new people getting interested in webcam astrophotography and RegiStax, the Ken Hough note and my outline would be a nice Appendix entry for the RegiStax User Manual. Does anyone know who “owns” responsibiity or access to the User Manual, a contact person, that I could work with to include this for the Linux community?

[Omaroo (Chris Malikoff)]

Great reference Randy - thanks. I haven't needed to use Registax for quite a while, but may soon be going back to lunar mosaic gathering and need it again to process AVIs. I do run Linux, but run XP in a vBox VM rather than directly under Wine for those odd programs like Registax. It's an option for you anyway..

[iceman (Mike)]

hi Randy

Don't forget Registax 5 is now released, and supports large AVI's too (finally!).

You can contact Cor through his website to submit info for a user manual.
http://www.astronomie.be/registax/

Cheers

[bojan]

When I had a problem with AVI's generated by my Kyocera camera, I used one of video converter programs (there are a number of freeware available on web) . to convert AVI to AVI..
It seemed to be the same thing but after conversion, Registax managed to open and process the converted file.

[Omaroo (Chris Malikoff)]

Originally Posted by bojan

When I had a problem with AVI's generated by my Kyocera camera, I used one of video converter programs (there are a number of freeware available on web) . to convert AVI to AVI..
It seemed to be the same thing but after conversion, Registax managed to open and process the converted file.

I guess that the point of the post is that he's found that Registax running under the Wine API in Linux has a colourspace issue Bojan. Why did you, as such, need to convert yours? Did the Kyocera produce dud AVI's?

[bojan]

No idea...
Avi's from Kyocera were perfectly viewable by any codec used by windows, but Registax complained.
After conversion (the file size changed), Registax could handle them.

[luka]

Randy, thanks for the info. This explains few things...

Bojan, I suppose you had no choice, but AVI-to-AVI conversions should be avoided if possible (as should most of other conversions).
Sometimes only the header/keyframes are rewritten but usually the whole video is re-encoded (to a diferent codec, bitrate...) which leads to a loss of quality.