Arista error “Not a recognised media file!”

I had been happily using Arista Transcoder to compress videos taken from my camera into something more usable, when one day, up pops this error:

Error! Conversion failed! Reason: Not a recognised media file!

 The same happened if I chose a different output format like WebM too. Why? After much head scratching, I found the cause. I had been experimenting with lots of video conversion software, and as part of it was trying to get hardware accelerated H.264 encoding working on the Intel HD3000 IGP in my computer. Part of this included installing various packages to do with VA-API. One of them was a GStreamer package – gstreamer0.10-vaapi

By running Arista from the command line I noticed that it was attempting to use VA-API, which is what I wanted after all:

Although no errors were reported, this GStreamer package turned out to be the culprit. Simply uninstalling gstreamer0.10-vaapi caused Arista to not attempt to use VA-API, and the video converting could resume, although I assume in a non-hardware accelerated fashion.

One thought on “Arista error “Not a recognised media file!”

Comments are closed.