# Playing .mov results in "moov atom not found"



## MarcoB (Feb 25, 2017)

Hi,

My wife has an iPhone on which she created a movie from some photo's. The result is a .mov file. The file plays fine on her Windows laptop. I tried to play it on FreeBSD with mpv but this results in:

```
[ffmpeg/demuxer] mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2: moov atom not found
[lavf] avformat_open_input() failed
[ffmpeg/demuxer] mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2: moov atom not found
[lavf] avformat_open_input() failed
Failed to recognize file format.
```
So I thought this is some codec issue and installed VLC to see if that works better, but VLC gave the same error message. I also tried to play it on a laptop running Slackware Linux with Xine, but Xine complains about a missing "demuxer", which is probably the same problem as on FreeBSD.

So the question is if it's possible to play .mov files created on an Apple iPhone? Or is this a digital rights thing and not possible to play on an open source OS?

Regards,
Marco


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## SirDice (Feb 28, 2017)

The extension .mov indicates it's a Quicktime format. But this is a container format and says nothing about the actual codecs used to encode video and audio.


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## aragats (Feb 28, 2017)

MarcoB , if you provide a sample, most probably, the actual reason can be revealed easy.
The error message itself is not very specific, I've seen it in various situations, e.g. when an _*mp4*_ file is trimmed.


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## MarcoB (Feb 28, 2017)

The movie is based on photo's of our 5-year old son and some of his friends. Don't want it to post it on a public site. The created mov file is not altered in any way btw.


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## aragats (Feb 28, 2017)

Well, you can always create another one ;-)
I would suggest trying the official samples from Apple site first: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201549.


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## MarcoB (Feb 28, 2017)

The samples from Apple work fine. I'll try to create another one later. Thanks.


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