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Inspiring
July 20, 2017
Question

The file has no audio or video streams (AVI)

  • July 20, 2017
  • 4 replies
  • 3075 views

I am having difficulty importing an AVI file in Adobe Premiere Pro 2017 and also in After Effects 2017.  The message I see on Premiere Pro is "The file has no audio or video streams" when I try to import it.  It plays fine in a Dropbox preview, but will not play in Quicktime either. I am hoping to edit the file in Premiere Pro and After Effects and have tried clearing the media cache, renaming the cache, moving the cache, updating Premiere Pro, restarting the computer, restarting the app, and have checked the Codec of the video, which is H.264.  Any help is greatly appreciated! 

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    4 replies

    Inspiring
    July 25, 2017

    Thanks all, for the suggestions!  What ended up fixing it was this advice which I found on another forum:

    You need to convert the codec used to encode the video to something that the players you are trying to use support. MPlayer supports a wider range of codecs than many players.

    To allow you to view the video in other players you need to transcode the video using an application like ffmpeg. The command below will provide the conversion you need:

    ffmpeg -i foo.264 -c:a aac -c:v libx264 -preset medium foo.mp4

    i - input file

    c:a - set audio codec to transcode to. Here I chose AAC

    c:v - set video codec to transcode to. libx264 is used to transcode to H.264, one of the most common and widely used video codecs. Most players should be able to play files encoded with H.264.

    preset - used to quickly define the H.264 encoding parameters. Choose from ultrafast,superfast, veryfast, faster, fast, medium, slow, slower, veryslow, placebo. There is obviously a trade-off between quality and transcode speed here.

    After running this command I could play the video you uploaded in QuickTime on OS X.

    If you use -copy or don't specify a codec, then ffmpeg will use the same codec as the source. So the command

    ffmpeg -f h264 -i foo.264 -c copy foo.mp4

    Will change the container around the video to mp4, but not the video encoding itself.

    Legend
    July 20, 2017

    Premiere Pro doesn't play nice with H.264 in the .avi format.  Best to use .mp4 format for H.264 media.

    Community Expert
    July 20, 2017

    I don't know if you're on Windows or Mac. If you're on Windows try installing a Quicktime viewer. This cures a lot of ills like this.

    https://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/

    Inspiring
    July 20, 2017

    This is the information I get from the Mediainfo app about the file:

    General

    Format : AVI

    Format/Info : Audio Video Interleave

    File size : 124 MiB

    Duration : 43mn 38s

    Overall bit rate : 397 Kbps

    Video

    ID : 0

    Format : AVC

    Format/Info : Advanced Video Codec

    Format profile : Baseline@L2

    Format settings, CABAC : No

    Format settings, ReFrames : 1 frame

    Codec ID : H264

    Duration : 43mn 38s

    Bit rate : 394 Kbps

    Width : 352 pixels

    Height : 240 pixels

    Display aspect ratio : 3:2

    Frame rate : 29.970 (30000/1001) fps

    Standard : NTSC

    Color space : YUV

    Chroma subsampling : 4:2:0

    Bit depth : 8 bits

    Scan type : Progressive

    Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.156

    Stream size : 123 MiB (99%)