I've got some cameras that seemingly only record in MP4.
When I try and watch them in Windows 10 I can view them, but can only watch each file as it runs. The slider bar won't allow me to drag to a position in the movie.
Tried VLC, Anyfile and a few other but have the same issue. Even tried converting to avi within VLC and that don't work either.
Laptop is bang up to date with all windows updates.
Any ideas, anyone?
Also, when on this site I get annoying pop ups, but nowhere else. Running Chrome.
OK.
mp4 isn't an AV format, it's a container. What's inside it could be anything. By way of an analogy you could be asking why you can't open Zip files in Word. So your first question need to be, what format are your cameras actually outputting?
You might get some traction using Handbrake. https://handbrake.fr/
Pop-ups, see the penultimate post in the FAQ.
Can I confirm you are transferring the files to your computer, not just viewing them on your camera? (via the laptop)
Handbrake is a great conversion tool, not quick, but you queue up jobs and walk away.
VLC can do some strange stuff due to the way they've integrated the codec libaries into the player app. There are some workarounds, like disabling hardware acceleration, changing the cache size.
Personally, I'd rather use ffplay with the ffmpeg libraries, that way I've got a suite that can handle both playback and transcoding and it is easier to trace how it is working.
Can I confirm you are transferring the files to your computer, not just viewing them on your camera? (via the laptop)
This can be quite important if the camera uses MTP and not USB mass storage as seeking in MTP is broken in a lot of instances so there is no way to FF/RW.
Clue is in the 'T' bit there, it's a Transfer protocol not a playback protocol. But yeah, that's a very good shout and one that hadn't occurred to me.
Can I confirm you are transferring the files to your computer, not just viewing them on your camera? (via the laptop)
transferred from micro SD card to laptop.
This can be quite important if the camera uses MTP and not USB mass storage as seeking in MTP is broken in a lot of instances so there is no way to FF/RW.
This appears to be the exact problem.
Those two answers would be mutually exclusive. Are you transferring (copying) them or not?