August 9, 2026

Video - DaVinci Resolve - The linux AAC bug

I call this a bug, because the paid (studio) version should provide this. I understand (to a point) that on Windows and Mac, Microsoft and Apple have both paid off the slimy weasles that hold some evil patent on this audio encoding algorithm. But I paid good money for DR Studio explicitly because I thought it would "fix" this issue. But it didn't.

So the symptoms are that you import a video into DR and get no sound. Then you look closely and see that an AAC codec for audio has been detected. On linux, DR just silently fails and you get no audio.

The "fix" is to transcode the audio using ffmpeg via a command like: 

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v copy -c:a pcm_s16le output.mov
for f in *.mp4; do
  ffmpeg -i "$f" -c:v copy -c:a pcm_s16le "${f%.mp4}_wav.mov"
done
I'm not sure if the change from .mp4 to .mov is required. I use these commands on a file from my Canon R5. 
mv pen.mp4 pen_bad.mp4
ffmpeg -i pen_bad.mp4 -c:v copy -c:a pcm_s16le pen.mp4
This works! At first I thought it didn't, but that was because DR was holding onto the old pen.mp4 with the AAC encoding (or something of the sort). After I restarted DR, it gave me sound from pen.mp4 and indicated linear PCM.

The following also works: 

ffmpeg -i pen_bad.mp4 -c:v copy -c:a pcm_s16le pen.mov
The increase in file size is pretty trivial, why bother with AAC?

Fix it in the camera

In the case of my Canon R5, I can tell it not to compress audio and this problem goes away. I don't know yet if I can made a similar configuration change to my Sony A6600.

Put the camera into video mode by pressing MODE on top of the camera, then the INFO button on the back. Now press MENU and use the wheel around the MODE button to go to the orange camera menu set, second from the right. On my camera menu 4 has "Audio compression" as an option. I turn this off and now when I shoot video, DR can read the audio on the files.

Rather than showing AAC and no sound, I now see "Linear PCM" and I get sound. Great!!

A lost hack

A guy hacked DR to fix this 2 months ago, but the Github link is already gone, somebody must have gotten upset. The Github user is gone too.
Feedback? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's Digital Photography Info / tom@mmto.org