The following issue is observed across multiple versions of GStreamer, starting as early as plugins-good version 0.10.11, and continuing through at least 0.10.14.  I've looked at the changes made between 0.10.14 and (current), and I don't see anything that would affect this issue.

Our development platform is Ubuntu Linux, i386.  The problem exists on at least Hardy and Jaunty.

We have a gstreamer-based application that is making AVI files containing image/x-j2c data in the video stream.  Users play back these files on Windows PCs, using the Morgan JPEG2000 codec.  These recordings are generally very large -- up to 60GB in size.  Because of another issue (see bug report 597847), we have been unable to use Windows Media Player to play back these large files.  The only player that we have found that will use the Morgan JPEG2000 codec on multiple cores (for performance), and will also play files that are larger than 4GB, is the so-called "Media Player Classic."

Unfortunately, we have an intermittent problem that files smaller than 4GB will play audio-only on Media Player classic.  It appears to be an indexing-related problem.  MPC spends several seconds working on the file (perhaps rebuilding an index?), but then no video appears.

If we use mencoder (based on ffmpeg and libavformat) to re-mux the AVI file, e.g.:
    mencoder badSmall.avi -oac copy -ovc copy -o fixedSmall.avi

the resulting AVI file plays fine on Media Player classic.

I have discussed this issue with users "bilboed", "wtay", and "_tim" on the #gstreamer IRC channel, and they requested that I write this bug.  They requested that I attach log file output that comes from the following commands:

<bilboed>	tcrews, produce the log with GST_DEBUG=2,avi*:5 gst-launch-0.10 filesrc location=badSmall.avi ! avidemux ! fakesink > badSmall1.log
<bilboed>	tcrews, produce the log with GST_DEBUG=2,avi*:5 gst-launch-0.10 filesrc location=badSmall.avi ! avidemux ! fakesink 2> badSmall2.log

There were three AVI files that I made to support this bug report
    badSmall.avi -- Small file recorded by our application.  Does not play in Media Player Classic
    fixedSmall.avi -- badSmall.avi, re-muxed by mencoder as described above.  Plays in MPC
    goodSmall.avi -- Small file recorded by our application.  Plays OK in Media Player Classic

I ran bilboed's suggested two commands for all three files, resulting in
    badSmall1.log - stdout output for badSmall.avi avidemux
    badSmall2.log - stderr output for badSmall.avi avidemux
    fixedSmall1.log - stdout output for fixedSmall.avi avidemux
    fixedSmall2.log - stderr output for fixedSmall.avi avidemux
    goodSmall1.log - stdout output for goodSmall.avi avidemux
    goodSmall2.log - stderr output for goodSmall.avi avidemux


These log files are found in the attached tarball, mpc_issue_logs.tgz

I have also submitted a related issue (597847) about files larger than 4GB not playing under different conditions.