Cinepak video for Fiji / ImageJ

Fiji / ImageJ cannot directly read Cinepak codec video files. Convert from Cinepak to popular video formats using FFmpeg. This conversion can be done on the command line as in this article, via an FFmpeg import plugin. Motion JPEG is widely-compatible with video players including ImageJ.

ffmpeg -i old.avi -c:v mjpeg -q:v 1 out.avi

Uncompressed AVI output file size could be a factor of 10 larger than the Cinepak version. By definition, every video player should be able to play uncompressed AVI–including ImageJ.

ffmpeg -i old.avi -c:v rawvideo out.avi

Lossless FFV1 preserves the original video quality with lossless compression. Many video players can handle FFV1 AVI video.

ffmpeg -i old.avi -c:v ffv1 out.avi

The advantage of using a PNG image stack comes in frame-by-frame analysis of the video.

Consider converting video to HDF5 using dmcutils/avi2hdf5.py for analysis purposes.