Cmd Line MPEG4 Encoder - ffmpeg

[JUC]

I'll try it with -t 300 and see if I can get it to drop out. I have however, compressed 30 minute clips with no dropouts.

[JUC]

Hey Bubster, BTW thanks for helping me through this. Anyway, I got the 5 minute clip to work fine. So, something is happening later down the compression. I know I won't be able to upload it but should I try compressing an hour clip from the same recording?
JUC

[JUC]

bump

[Bubster]

Originally posted by JUC
Hey Bubster, BTW thanks for helping me through this. Anyway, I got the 5 minute clip to work fine. So, something is happening later down the compression. I know I won't be able to upload it but should I try compressing an hour clip from the same recording?
JUC

Hi, sorry, wasn't paying attention for the last week or so.

I'm a bit out of ideas on this. How long (roughly) does the recording have to get before the sound starts dropping out near the start? You'll probably have to try a few experiments to figure that out, if you've got some time (and lots of patience).

I'm now at the stage where a question to the ffmpeg mailing list is probably required. Any info you can provide about the above would be very useful. They're quite "terse" on the ffmpeg list, so I might not get very far without plenty of info to give them.

- Neil.

[JUC]

alright, ill do some 'test' compressions tonight and see where I get. I tried another 2 hour file and the same thing happened--sound dropped out after 5 or 6 sec. and it only showed up as 1 hour 11 minutes. I also tried a 30 minute clip and the audio worked fine for the whole thing, but it was only showing up as 27 minutes and 33 sec.---kind of weird. I am using the default settings for compression. I will try an hour show and see where that gets me to give you some more info. Let me know what else you may need. Thanks
JUC

[Bubster]

Originally posted by JUC
alright, ill do some 'test' compressions tonight and see where I get. I tried another 2 hour file and the same thing happened--sound dropped out after 5 or 6 sec. and it only showed up as 1 hour 11 minutes. I also tried a 30 minute clip and the audio worked fine for the whole thing, but it was only showing up as 27 minutes and 33 sec.---kind of weird. I am using the default settings for compression. I will try an hour show and see where that gets me to give you some more info. Let me know what else you may need. Thanks
JUC

Just to check, when you talk about a 30 min clip, you do mean a 2 hour source video compressed with the "-t" flag to restrict output to 30 mins, is that right?

- Neil.

[JUC]

actually, I just meant a 30 minute source file being compressed without the "-t" flag. I was just trying this to see if it worked--and it did, because the 2 hour file without the "-t" flag didn't. I will try a 2 hour file and keep trying different "-t" values so I can pinpoint for you where the sound is dropping out. This may help.
JUC

[JUC]

alright, I did some testing with a 2 hour source file. Using the -t values set to compress the first 30 minutes, 60 minutes, 90 minutes this is what i found. The 30 minute clip worked fine. The 60 minute clip worked fine. The 90 minute clip did NOT and resulted in the same 1:11 minute file as the 2 hour show (and the audio drops out completely after 5-6 sec.. So, something is happening between 1 hour and 2 hours in my compression. Let me know what else you may need. Thanks
JUC

[Bubster]

So, as well as losing sound after 5-6 secs, the total time of the video is coming out at 1:11 (as in 1 minute, 11 secs), is that right?

Does that always happen to you, or have you ever had the audio dropout, but a reasonable sized video length (not exactly the same as the source, but close)?

- Neil.

[JUC]

Neil, sorry I wan't clearer, the video is coming out at 1 hour 11 minutes. Everytime I had the audio drop out (which so far is only for shows over 1 hour) the time stamp indicates 1 hour 11 minutes. This is for both 1 hour and 30 minute clips as well as 2 hour clips (this is all from a 2 hour show compressed using different -t values to control how much is compressed). Hope this helps
JUC

[jsturtevant]

I've downloaded the 0.4.8, but it doesn't support the commandline in this thread. I assume 0.4.9 does... searched and could not find.

any help would be appreciated...
thx

[cupra]

Just played around with some large compressed AVIs and figured out that I can play them in Media Player Classic without the audio dropouts. So it's not directly ffmpegs problem.

What I could figure out is that the AVI Splitter built into Windows (in the quartz.dll that comes with DirectX) can't handle our recorded, recompressed AVIs properly, leading to audio stopping after a couple of seconds.

But if we choose to install a different AVI Splitter, like the one from here, everything should sound smooth.

Here is a quick link to the file : click
Unzip it and copy the AVISplitter.ax from the Release folder to your \WinNT\System32 folder and run regsvr32 \WinNT\System32\AVISplitter.ax from a command prompt.
The new AVI Splitter by default has a merit of 0x00600001, the builtin one has 0x00600000, so our newly installed splitter should be used by any DirectShow application you have installed - SageTV, Meedio, Windows Media Player, whatever.

I haven't experienced any problems by using the new AVI Splitter so far, so enjoy.

[JUC]

THANK YOU! I am going to try this right now and compress a file longer than an hour and see what happens.
JUC

[Bubster]

Yes, it sounds pretty promising.

Sorry JUC, I haven't had any spare time to look at this stuff for the last few weeks, so I hope Cupra's suggestion works for you (and anyone else who was having this problem).

- Neil.

[heffe2001]

I just compressed my first show with the ffmpeg files supplied here, and noticed that on the resulting file I had some major blocking in the video. I checked the original file, and no blocking was present. Has anybody else seen this behavior?

The machine I'm using to compress is a 3ghz P4, 1gb Ram, 120gb SATA HD (although the files being compressed are on network drives, the original & the compressed one).

Now if comskip worked with the compressed files, I'd be set .

[ugh]

Can someone point me to where I can download ffmepeg pickup/compressor. The links in post #183 and 156 are dead.

I'd love to try this. You guys have done some awesome work here!
Thanks!

[Bubster]

Originally Posted by ugh

Can someone point me to where I can download ffmepeg pickup/compressor. The links in post #183 and 156 are dead.

I'd love to try this. You guys have done some awesome work here!
Thanks!

Those links should work again now. The stuff from post #183 is the easiest to get and set up (probably).

- Neil.

[JUC]

Cupra's suggestion worked great. I can finally compress a hour hour recording and get sound throughout!!!
thanks
JUC

[insomniac]

I just started testing compression but am havign issues. I followed the great instructions in post #183 w/o problems (all paths are correct, etc)

I believe my problem is that im using UNC pathnames, and that I am trying compression from my client. output of my ffmpegpickup.log is below:
[Listing of .xml to be processed]
.\Jobs\TheRealWorldPhiladelphia-6491197-0.mpg.xml

================================================================
STARTED: 2004-09-29 09:02:13
[Input Directory]
sage\\sage3
[Input Filename]
TheRealWorldPhiladelphia-6491197-0.mpg
[Output Directory]
F:\Video-Library\The Real World
[Output Filename]
TheRealWorldPhiladelphia-6491197-0.avi

[Video Rate]
1800kbs
[Video Codec]
mpeg4
[Audio Rate]
192kbps
[Audio Codec]
mp3

[Error]
The input file could not be found:
sage\sage3\TheRealWorldPhiladelphia-6491197-0.mpg
The pickup file will remain, please correct!

[Error]
The conversion process appears to not have completed successfully...please verify!
[Error]
The movie file was not actually created like anticipated, it will be attempted next time around.
COMPLETED: 2004-09-29 09:02:14


"sage\sage3" is my server name and 1 of 3 UNC shared video directories.

Im think that this log should reflect the correct UNC path "\\sage\sage3" , but am not sure where to make this correction.

Help!?

EDIT:

commandline works just fine by unc. I just cannot get edit the property file correctly to get it to pass "\\" in front of the file name to get it to work...sigh

ideas?

[insomniac]

well.....

From the lack of response, I guess there is not UNC fix for this, so I decided to make my own (or at least start a proof of concept).

Below is a batch file that basically parses the xml in the dump directory and calls ffmpeg to compress the files individually. You may use drive letter or UNC...

Before you comment. Yes I know its crude. I did not care to variablize anything yet. Its probably better that way for now.

so far, because i have yet to use ffmpeg more than about 5 minutes, (and dont even know the command line parameters yet), I did not create a cleanup process to remove the xml files in the dump dir, or delete the original .mpg. Doesnt FFMPEG do these already by passing an option?

anyway..crude proof of concept to follow:


DEL c:\output.txt
DEL c:\newout.txt
DEL c:\testout.txt
DEL c:\clean.txt
DEL c:\finalout.txt
SET CONVERTMEDIR=C:\Program Files\Frey Technologies\SageTV\compressor\Jobs
SET OUTPUTDIR=\\sage\E\video-library


dir /B "c:\Program Files\Frey Technologies\SageTV\compressor\jobs" >> c:\output.txt
FOR /F "tokens=1,2,3 delims=." %%a IN (c:\output.txt) DO echo %%a >> c:\newout.txt
FOR /F %%a IN (c:\newout.txt) Do find /I "%%a" "%CONVERTMEDIR%\%%a.mpg.xml" >> c:\testout.txt
FOR /F "eol=- tokens=17 delims=<" %%a IN (c:\testout.txt) DO echo %%a >> c:\clean.txt
FOR /F "tokens=2 delims=>." %%a IN (c:\clean.txt) Do echo %%a >> c:\finalout.txt

FOR /F "tokens=1,2,3,4 delims=\ " %%a IN (c:\finalout.txt) Do ffmpeg -i \\%%a\%%b\%%c.mpg -hq -deinterlace -y -f avi -vcodec mpeg4 -b 1600 -async 1 -acodec mp3 -ab 192 %OUTPUTDIR%\%%c.avi


end script...

did I miss anything else? It doesnt seem like there are any real hooks which I might be breaking, but just making sure

I.