Cmd Line MPEG4 Encoder - ffmpeg

[Bubster]

Meant to say, it's probably best to set the video/audio bitrates to 600/64 (or lower if your eyes/ears can take it) for the -t 30 test, just to keep the file sizes down for uploading/downloading. The ffmpeg maintainer also doesn't like people uploading huge files to his server, so we'll need to keep them small if we want any help from him.

- Neil.

[Ryokurin]

sorry, but I didnt even notice that you had a version to try. ill try it when I get home on something.

[Bubster]

OK, I've set up a folder on my ftp site to exchange (small) test files on.

The address is: r0x0rz.shacknet.nu (or use this link).

The test videos should go in the "Sage" folder. Within that, I suggest using a folder per person, with a "working" or "non-working" label added to the name, depending on whether the tests work for the originator of the files.

I've put my first example in there. It's a "working" example, as in it works for me. There's a text file alongside it (of the same name but with a .txt extension) which gives the command line that was used to make it. If some of the people who are having sound dropout issues can get this file and see if the sound works for the full 30 secs, that would be good. Remember to post your results here, either way - a negative is every bit as useful as a positive at this stage.

- Neil.

[Bubster]

Originally posted by Crashless
I'll give your xvid a try, but won't be able to until next week. I'd still prefer divx, as I have an MVP that I'd like to be able to play the resulting videos on. But since I have a solution I'm happy with for now, I don't mind helping you guys out. But unfortunately, I can't until next week.

The verison I gave a link to doesn't have the xvid stuff in it (at least, I don't _think_ I updated it), mainly because I didn't want to confuse things while the sound issue was still going on. I'll put it on my ftp server if anyone wants to try it out.

Bubster, please don't give up on us. I've recently realized that this community is much less excited (in general) about beta testing complex solutions than say, the Meedio community. Not that that's bad, it's just a result of the people that are drawn to different solutions. Once you get a solution though, and streamline it for newb-friendly installation, people will love you. I guarantee it.

No worries. I wasn't giving up, but there wasn't much more I could do without other people doing some tests. The first rule of debugging is to recreate the problem, but I can't do that here as it always seems to work for me. Sometimes there's nothing worse than having a thing go and always work on you, no matter how much you want it to break.

BTW, my impression was that there was a fairly mixed group of people in here, including a fair few with lots of technical know-how. I just assumed everyone was too busy and/or not interested enough in this. Hopefully it's the former, and there'll be a flurry of new activity soon.

- Neil.

[RedCoat999]

Bubster
I have downloaded Test1 and Test2 and found watching Sky thoroughly enjoyable for all 30 seconds. Audio good.

I have uploaded one folder with a file that was originally 1hr 52 min (only first 30 secs encoded). Worked for me.

[Bubster]

Nice one, works here too. Is that some dating show? I do hope that's a random selection and not something you want to compress and keep for posterity.

Hopefully some people who were having problems will be able to test these files soon and upload some broken ones too.

BTW, have you tried compressing the whole video yet? Based on what people have been seeing (no change between a full compress and a 30 second one), I suspect it will be fine for you, but there's one thing you can be sure of: that you can't be sure of anything.

- Neil.

[RedCoat999]

That was the wonderfully tacky and yet watchable Amish in the City. Boy those Amish women have good bods!

[davey_fl]

Bubster: After reloading my machine with Xp Pro, downloading the latest version of ffmpeg and trying your command from your test1.txt I no longer have the audio dropout of the atrifacts due to frameloss

So now I'm trying to intergrate this command back into the properties file for ffmpeg pickup and running into some problems. The EXE_Command is set to false, so where does the program pickup the commands from? If I set this to true for testing purposes it works, but doesn't create files in the proper directories with correct names etc.

Thanks for your work on this fellow Glasgonian!

davey

[Alex0230]

Originally posted by davey_fl
Bubster: After reloading my machine with Xp Pro, downloading the latest version of ffmpeg and trying your command from your test1.txt I no longer have the audio dropout of the atrifacts due to frameloss

So now I'm trying to intergrate this command back into the properties file for ffmpeg pickup and running into some problems. The EXE_Command is set to false, so where does the program pickup the commands from? If I set this to true for testing purposes it works, but doesn't create files in the proper directories with correct names etc.

Thanks for your work on this fellow Glasgonian!

davey

If exe_command "enabled" is set to false, then it uses a default internal command which is basically the same as the original value that was in the props file when you downloaded it. : )

I'm back checking the forums a bit more now...the last few weeks I've been looking/moving and haven't really been able to work on this. Hopefully this weekend I can invest some time and maybe find a compressor that is command line friendly and easy to call.

[Bubster]

Originally posted by davey_fl
Bubster: After reloading my machine with Xp Pro, downloading the latest version of ffmpeg and trying your command from your test1.txt I no longer have the audio dropout of the atrifacts due to frameloss

Interesting... So you were getting the audio dropout before, but it's gone now? Question is: was it your reinstallation of XP or the version of ffmpeg that made the difference?

So now I'm trying to intergrate this command back into the properties file for ffmpeg pickup and running into some problems. The EXE_Command is set to false, so where does the program pickup the commands from? If I set this to true for testing purposes it works, but doesn't create files in the proper directories with correct names etc.

When you set it to true, are you still using the @INPUT and @OUTPUT fields in the command? These get replaced with the correct names, so it's vital that they are there.

Also make sure you've got "-i " in front of @INPUT, and put it right after the "ffmpeg" at the start of the command line (parameters to ffmpeg affect the next file mentioned on the command line, and you want all of them to affect the output file, so you shouldn't have much before the input file is specified).

Here's a simple example that works, with only @INPUT and @OUTPUT being used:

ffmpeg -i @INPUT -hq -deinterlace -y -f avi -vcodec mpeg4 -b 1600 -async 1 -acodec mp3 -ab 192 @OUTPUT

If you look in "ffmpegPickup.log" after running the job processor, you can see the commandline that was constructed. It's worth checking this to make sure it's doing what you expect.

Thanks for your work on this fellow Glasgonian!

Cheers, but I can't really take any credit. Most of it has been done by mlbdude and Alex0230, so three cheers to them...

- Neil.

[davey_fl]

Well then thanks to Alex and mlbdude also. I think the issue was more using an old version of ffmpeg. Once I got the update, and the 7/22/04 grabber, everything works. It processes much faster than virtualdubmpeg2 as it doesn't have to parse the file first. Let's hope this option stays around in futuer releases of mlbdude's stv!

davey

[edbmdave]

Could someone document (In one spot) the working solution with links to the appropriate software/files?

I will try and validate it and it can serve as a reference for others who want to get compression working.

Thanks

[mlbdude]

Been out for awhile, notice some positive posts. Has anyone gotten this working with ffmpeg yet? If so how?

[Bubster]

Originally posted by edbmdave
Could someone document (In one spot) the working solution with links to the appropriate software/files?

I will try and validate it and it can serve as a reference for others who want to get compression working.

I suppose the first thing you want to try is running ffmpeg on a large Sage recording and see if it works ok for you. I posted a simplified command line on page 8 of this thread, about 5 posts from the bottom, as well as a link to the version of ffmpeg I built from the most recent code in their CVS depot.

If you want to save some time, try adding "-t 30" to the command line, which will limit the output to 30 seconds, and see if you get audio for the full clip. If you do, it's very likely that you won't get any audio problems if you compress the entire clip, but it's worth testing that as well if you have time to spare.

The setting up of the Sage job processing stuff is a little involved, and should probably be re-documented in one place again, but it's kind of jumping the gun if people are still having ffmpeg problems and there's no alternative solution that suits everyone either.

[Bubster]

Originally posted by mlbdude
Been out for awhile, notice some positive posts. Has anyone gotten this working with ffmpeg yet? If so how?

It works fine for me (but then it did from the start, so that doesn't say much), but there was a change in fortunes for davey_fl who managed to eliminate the sound dropout. The only problem is that he made several changes (reinstalling XP, using my build of ffmpeg, and using the same command line I have been using), so we don't know which of these fixed the issue for him.

I believe you tried my build of ffmpeg and still got the sound dropout, so that would suggest that it was the XP re-install or the different command line that helped, but it's hard to be certain at this stage. If you can try that version of ffmpeg and that command line and see if it works for you, without an XP re-install, and see if it works, we might be a bit closer to an answer.

Another thing worth trying is downloading the working test movies people have uploaded to my ftp server and see if they work for you. If these don't work for you, it suggests some sort of decoder problem, rather than an issue with ffmpeg itself, although it could be that ffmpeg is generating data which some decoders don't like. It would be really useful if we could establish this to be the case, as we would then have the option of avoiding certain decoders, or seeing if ffmpeg can be "fixed" to produce data more friendly to the decoders that aren't working.

So far, we haven't had anyone post a broken movie, or had anyone who was having problems test a "working" one, so there's a whole lot of potentially useful info we're missing until someone does this.

[edbmdave]

Originally posted by Bubster
I suppose the first thing you want to try is running ffmpeg on a large Sage recording and see if it works ok for you. I posted a simplified command line on page 8 of this thread, about 5 posts from the bottom, as well as a link to the version of ffmpeg I built from the most recent code in their CVS depot.

If you want to save some time, try adding "-t 30" to the command line, which will limit the output to 30 seconds, and see if you get audio for the full clip. If you do, it's very likely that you won't get any audio problems if you compress the entire clip, but it's worth testing that as well if you have time to spare.

The setting up of the Sage job processing stuff is a little involved, and should probably be re-documented in one place again, but it's kind of jumping the gun if people are still having ffmpeg problems and there's no alternative solution that suits everyone either.

The link to your version of ffmpeg does not work. is the file still there? I was able to get to you web page, just not the ffmpeg.zip

[Bubster]

Originally posted by edbmdave
The link to your version of ffmpeg does not work. is the file still there? I was able to get to you web page, just not the ffmpeg.zip

Sorry, I managed to delete it by mistake. It's back up there now.

[falchulk]

Personally, I have been using windows media encoder to renecode. Works well with scripting support. The only problem is that I have to launch an external player to watch them!

[edbmdave]

Originally posted by Bubster
I suppose the first thing you want to try is running ffmpeg on a large Sage recording and see if it works ok for you. I posted a simplified command line on page 8 of this thread, about 5 posts from the bottom, as well as a link to the version of ffmpeg I built from the most recent code in their CVS depot.

If you want to save some time, try adding "-t 30" to the command line, which will limit the output to 30 seconds, and see if you get audio for the full clip. If you do, it's very likely that you won't get any audio problems if you compress the entire clip, but it's worth testing that as well if you have time to spare.

The setting up of the Sage job processing stuff is a little involved, and should probably be re-documented in one place again, but it's kind of jumping the gun if people are still having ffmpeg problems and there's no alternative solution that suits everyone either.

IT WORKS. I was definately having the audio drop out at around 10 seconds. I have (using the command line you referenced in your post on page 8) successfuly encoded and played back a 30 second, 60 second, 5 minute, 20 minutes, 1 hour, and 2.5 hour MPG2. Works beautifully. What do we have to do to get the compress java thing to use that command sequence? It works!!!

[Muchacho]

To start I wanted to thank everyone involved for the hard work. I too have been having success with ffmpeg. I have only done a 30 sec test on a long recording and there was no audio dropout ( I did it from the commandline as well). I also have the mlbdude skin making xml files and the compressor tool picking them up and compressing. Works pretty slick I must say! Unfortunately my sage box is packed up for a few days while I paint the basement, but I am looking forward to more testing (i.e. using the tools and not the commandline) and would be glad to assist in anyway that I can. I have only played the longer show back with MPC so I dont know if it works with other players. I was thinking that the differences that people are having may have to do with the codec that is doing the decoding? I am using the latest ffdshow and have never installed any of the DIVX codecs if that helps. Also I thought that people who are having the dropouts may want to try playing them in MPC as Bubster has mentioned. Thanks for all the hard work- I cant wait to set the sage box back up....