Which video format is ok with Ableton Live 11?

[nc2010]

Hi,

I tried to drag and drop a few videos into Ableton 11, but either the video preview is a black square and only the sound track is available in Live, or nothing is available and we can see the error message "Could not be read. It may be corrupt or not licensed". However the .mp4 is fully playable in all other players.

I tried with both .avi or .mp4 files, some of them with sound, some of them without a sound track...
Some videos I tried had been encoded with a H264 codec.
Always the same unsuccessful result.

Which precise video format is accepted in Live?

Could someone post a format which is known working, as displayed in ffmpeg / ffprobe?

This one failed:

Code: Select all

Stream #0:0(und): Video: h264 (Main) (avc1 / ...), yuv420p(tv, bt709), 1280x720 [SAR 1:1 DAR 16:9], 999 kb/s, 25 fps, 25 tbr, 12800 tbn, 50 tbc (default)
Stream #0:1(eng): Audio: aac (LC) (mp4a / ...), 44100 Hz, stereo, fltp, 128 kb/s (default)

[[jur]]

Are you on Win or Mac?
Photojpeg is the most reliable format. Files are bigger in size but the format is very light for Live and it's frame accurate.
Also make sure your video doesn't have more than 2 audio channels or Live won't accept the file.

[nc2010]

I'm on PC. I never used PhotoJPEG, it seems to be far less common than the very classical H264.

Do you know why H264 doesn't work on Live 11?

Is there a way to make it work?

[Calagan]

I'm not on Windows, but normally h264/mp4 is perfectly usable in Live...

https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/artic ... sing-Video

In this page, they say that Live 12 doesn't need any third-party codec but Live 11 rely on installed codecs.
Do you have any codec bundle installed on your machine ?

[benmuetsch]

I don't know if this matters a lot, I'm working on an Intel Mac, but last year and at the beginning of this year I did some post-production Jobs for German trash-TV mostly editing and voice mixing. I always requested 720p H264 video files and they worked very well with Live 11.
The video files were each about 45 - 60min long.

[[jur]]

https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/artic ... sing-Video

I've asked the doc team to change this article several times, from my experience doing sound and music to video for a long time H264 isn't reliable enough.
It works, but it's definitely not precise enough when you need to edit frame accurate. I suppose this format has some kind of frames interpolation or whatnot and you can end up with bad surprises sync-wise, like wondering why what you synced to a frame at one point isn't synced anymore.

[Calagan]

https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/artic ... sing-Video

I've asked the doc team to change this article several times, from my experience doing sound and music to video for a long time H264 isn't reliable enough.
It works, but it's definitely not precise enough when you need to edit frame accurate. I suppose this format has some kind of frames interpolation or whatnot and you can end up with bad surprises sync-wise, like wondering why what you synced to a frame at one point isn't synced anymore.

Ok, thanks for the info. Is it on Windows and Mac, or only on Windows ?
I never noticed any issue on mac (but I'm not working very often on pictures)...

[nc2010]

Interesting info from https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/artic ... sing-Video for Live11+Windows:

Important: Haali Media Splitter is the only third-party codec that currently functions with Live 11 on Windows. To avoid video issues in Live 11, uninstall any other previously installed codecs, and leave only the Haali Media Splitter installed.

Can someone on Live11+Windows confirm that H264 doesn't work and only Haali works?

[nc2010]

I just installed "MatroskaSplitter.exe" which is mentioned here: https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/artic ... sing-Video

And now it works on Win Live11