The file has no audio or video streams (AVI)

[celinaf66945628]

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! 

[celinaf66945628]

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%)

[RobShultz]

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/

[excited_Genie16B8]

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

[celinaf66945628]

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.