Sorin
27th January 2008, 00:55
So I finally went through the pain and torture of learning to do encoding manually. For years I've been doing AutoGK (xvid) with results I was happy with. I tried doing it with regular Gordian Knot years ago, but I sucked at it, so went to AutoGK.
Recently, I got to wanting something that would fully utilize my quad core, since xvid/autogk was only using about 60%. I heard h.264 could use four cores properly, so since autogk doesn't support 264, I had to find a way to learn a program to do it manually. So after hours and hours of torture the other night, I got everything going properly in MeGUI.
The results are amazing and it was totally worth the hours of torture. My videos are 30-40% smaller, but they look and sound just as good, if not better, than the autogk xvid versions. The encodes were also a lot faster. The videos could probably be even smaller than they are, but I'm happy as they are. I usually set the file sizes for my encodes to be 15% of the size of the vob file, but the quality is so good even now that I could probably go to 10%. I do still think AutoGK is a fantasic program, especially for new people or those who just plain don't care, but for me MeGUI/x264 is my new solution.
I went through my firefly dvds last night and redid them in x264. With xvid/autogk they were, collectively, 5.79gb. With x264 via MeGUI, they are now 3.79gb. 32% smaller. The amazing thing is they look and sound just as good, if not better.
Problem: Anyways, I have encountered a problem though. I have one episode that just won't encode right. It works just find in AutoGK and regular GK, but it won't work right in MeGUI. It does the sound encoding fine, first pass fine, and second pass fine. It gets to the muxing part though, and crashes (always at the same point, 98% of writing stage). mp4box.exe crashes, with the Windows box that pops up when a program crashes "The following program has encountered and error and must be terminated" or whatever the message is (the one where it wants you to send an error report to MS). I tried redoing the encode from scratch three times, tried the muxing as a seperate job by itself, reripped the files from the DVD, and even tried a different version of mp4box.exe, but it still always crashes during the muxing (98% of the writing stage).
Any ideas?
Recently, I got to wanting something that would fully utilize my quad core, since xvid/autogk was only using about 60%. I heard h.264 could use four cores properly, so since autogk doesn't support 264, I had to find a way to learn a program to do it manually. So after hours and hours of torture the other night, I got everything going properly in MeGUI.
The results are amazing and it was totally worth the hours of torture. My videos are 30-40% smaller, but they look and sound just as good, if not better, than the autogk xvid versions. The encodes were also a lot faster. The videos could probably be even smaller than they are, but I'm happy as they are. I usually set the file sizes for my encodes to be 15% of the size of the vob file, but the quality is so good even now that I could probably go to 10%. I do still think AutoGK is a fantasic program, especially for new people or those who just plain don't care, but for me MeGUI/x264 is my new solution.
I went through my firefly dvds last night and redid them in x264. With xvid/autogk they were, collectively, 5.79gb. With x264 via MeGUI, they are now 3.79gb. 32% smaller. The amazing thing is they look and sound just as good, if not better.
Problem: Anyways, I have encountered a problem though. I have one episode that just won't encode right. It works just find in AutoGK and regular GK, but it won't work right in MeGUI. It does the sound encoding fine, first pass fine, and second pass fine. It gets to the muxing part though, and crashes (always at the same point, 98% of writing stage). mp4box.exe crashes, with the Windows box that pops up when a program crashes "The following program has encountered and error and must be terminated" or whatever the message is (the one where it wants you to send an error report to MS). I tried redoing the encode from scratch three times, tried the muxing as a seperate job by itself, reripped the files from the DVD, and even tried a different version of mp4box.exe, but it still always crashes during the muxing (98% of the writing stage).
Any ideas?