Reading MP4 Video files with Matlab in Win7

Hi,

I plan to do image processing on frames from .mp4 (h264) video files, but it seems I cannot get matlab to read the video files first.

The VideoReader class help does not list .mp4 as a supported file type, but accepts "any format supported by Microsoft DirectShow". The Windows player on my machine does read my mp4s, but matlab does not. Updating my codecs with the k-lite codec pack does nothing better.

I searched for solutions before posting here :

- videoIO library http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/newsreader/view_thread/252119 Unfortunately requires installation process that is beyond my knowledge (compilation, environment variables ...)

- video.MultimediaFileReader http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/newsreader/view_thread/303186 This does not work either, although I have the Video Processing blockset installed.

I know I can transform my mp4 into AVI using VirtualDub or something, but doing the whole process inside Matlab would save hours of work as I have many videos to analyse.

Thank you if anyone can help.

Emmanuel.

Answer 1

[Emmanuel]

R2011b pre-release now supports mpeg-4 and .mov in videoreader. http://www.mathworks.com/help/pdf_doc/matlab/relnotes_pr.pdf (see p. 13) I have not tested it yet (will probably wait for the final release), but this is good news!

Answer 2

[Joseph]

I am having the same issue as you. I downloaded the videoIO toolbox with the precompiled binaries for Windows XP, however it does not read in my mp4 video files. I don't think it is a missing codec, as WMP plays the file just fine.

There is apparently VideoReader in Matlab 2010b and newer; however I am running R2009a and only have access to R2010a at the moment. Looking into getting R2010b or newer. Wish there was an easier solution. Did you ever figure out your problem? I see your post is approximately 3 months old.

Answer 3

[Harsha Vardhan Rao Avunoori]

In the earlier versions of MATLAB with mmreader you can read a video file and this function supports most of the video formats.If you have the latest version of MATLAB then you should try using VideoReader()

For more information refer to the below link

http://www.mathworks.com/help/techdoc/ref/videoreaderclass.html

Let me know if it works for you :)

-Harsha

Answer 4

[Emmanuel]

I have 2010b and both mmreader and Videoreader fail to open my .mp4 files, even though Windows reader accepts to read them.

The problem remains.

The solution I chose for my last work is to transform .mp4 into separate .jpg frames with another software, and work on frames with matlab.

Answer 5

[Harsha Vardhan Rao Avunoori]

Which software did you use to extract frames ???

Answer 6

[Emmanuel]

I used a famous computer graphics suite, but I wish I could use Matlab !

Answer 7

[Marc Vivet]

You can use the Matlab VideoUtils toolbox:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/videoutils/

It is very easy to use.

Answer 8

[timmdd pan]

This works http://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/videoreader.html but I found this:http://www.mathworks.com/help/pdf_doc/matlab/relnotes_pr.pdf not available by now? may try to let mp4 to mkv or something?