Bug#587904: error message should say what to try next if codec not found

[Fabian Greffrath]

Am 02.07.2010 15:34, schrieb jidanni at jidanni.org:
> The reason may be documented in /usr/share/doc/ffmpeg/README.Debian.gz
> but it is very hard to tell.

I fail to see what is difficult to understand in this sentence from 
README.Debian: "I did not activate MP3 encoding (through LAME) in 
libavcodec [...]"

However, I agree that the error message

> Encoder (codec id 86017) not found for output stream #0.0

should be improved to at least call the encoder by name.

> OK, probably the message should be **codec disabled for legal reasons by Debian.
> Try putting debian-multimedia... on top of your /etc/apt/sources.list... and
> do apt-get update, then reinstall their version of this package**"

We have very good reasons to never ever recommend using packages from 
this repository. Furthermore, the MP3 encoder has never been actively 
*disabled* in Debian. ffmpeg is simply not built against LAME, because 
this is not available in Debian at all.

> P.S., does this really turn 8 kb/s into 64 kb/s? Is that a good thing to do?
>
> Well I tried -ab 8k and found out that the Stream #0.1: Audio: mp3, 22050 Hz, 2 channels, s16, 8 kb/s
> must be wrong. ffprobe gives the same wrong answer.

This is a completely different issue and should get its own bug report.

>
> P.S.S., the man page,
>
>         -ac channels
>             Set the number of audio channels (default = 1).
>
> is wrong. As you see above two channels were the output, even without
> this option.
>
> If it just extracts the mp3 then it should say so in several of the
> affected places on the man page.

dito.

  - Fabian