Issue with a video; but mainly: praise and respect

[MikeRich88]

https://samples.ffmpeg.org/asf-wmv/Alice%20Deejay%20-%20Back%20In%20My%20Life.asf - the video doesn't seem to move at all? Actually, I ought to update to 3.05 first, I see the updates are coming fast!

But also, OMG. QuickLookVideo 3.0 delighted me.

A couple of years ago I had the occasion to use an old iMac with Leopard that had Perian and all kinds of different video files, RM and ASF and MKV and whatever and I could QuickLook all of them and I thought "Wow, this is cool. Damn, we lost some something. It's gone forever."

And then deep in the bowels of Apple, for some unknown reason, we got Media Extensions, and then we got QuickLookVideo 3.0 because someone had the tenacity to figure out all the BS and hook up ffmpeg to QuickTime again.

Look at that. You can just load the RM file in QuickTime again. It just plays.

Never thought I'd see the day. You + whatever random people somewhere in Apple brought back something delightful. Respect.

[MikeRich88]

I'm having issues with QuickLook not even working at all. But if I open it in QuickTime, it works.

This is legit Perian 2.0 beta. You should legit ask them if you can call it that.

[Marginal]

I suspect that Media Extensions have been in macOS in some form for a while to support Apple's Pro codecs, but they were first documented publicly with macOS 15. I'm pleasantly surprised that I managed to get them working with FFmpeg since the expectations of the two APIs are so different. I've only just come across this blog post which mentions some of the Perian developers' difficulties working with QuickTime and I'm glad I didn't read it when I started out otherwise I may have been too discouraged since I see similar issues with AVFoundation.

I did consider asking the Perian developers whether I could use their name but decided I didn't want to look like I was trying to piggyback on their reputations.

Re this particular file:
AVFoundation thinks it understands .asf (and .avi) files and the Microsoft version of the MPEG-4 codec that this file uses. It's wrong about that, but by the time it figures this out it's too late for this app to do anything about it. I'll leave this issue open in case some new approach occurs to me.