Megui went a bit nuts.

[DL3]

As the title sudgests, megui has been going a bit nuty l8ly.
To save me a bit of re-typing I'll put up what I put on another forum about this.
BTW, had to wait 5 days after registering to post. Thats why this wasn't posted here.

Sorry to bother people. I tried to post this on doom9 forums but was told I need to be registred for 5 days before I can post so...

I've been encoding a lot of films latley in h264/mp4 for playback on ps3. The profile I crated in megui has been working great, untill a couple of days ago. I changed what I was doing ( upped the project resolution to 720p for bdrip ) and it seems to have knocked megui insane.

What I'm trying to do:- Produce BDRips of 720p resolutions, at just under 4 gig in size ( for fat 32 external ps3 hdd ) that will play back on ps3.

Since I started trying to do this, megui has never completed an encoding session. At first attempts, it gave me a popup at the end of the first pass asking if I realy wanted to stop the session ?..
Wither stoped or not, megui wouldn't unload or close, just carried on working hard ( I assume it was still encoding in the background ) but the encoding dialog vanished and megui would behave like idle ???
The log didn't show the first pass as failing. It said the job was completed and there was no failures ?????

Ditched the rip I was working on, got another brdisk and ripped it. Went to encode again and... well... I lined this up as a two pass encode but megui is repeating the task again and again without stopping. Check this ss to see what I'm talking about.

http://www.freeimagehosting.net/uploads/1a37d645e1.jpg

It keeps adding the full job to the end and doesn't look like it wants to stop. It's running straight through without end. It's been running for over 9 hours now, it's on it's fourth pass and is about to start it's fith.

Has megui finaly flipped it's lid? Am I experiancing an intense flash back?
Or more likely, is what I'm trying to do, asking to much of megui/the codec/the container?

BTW, there should only be job 1 & 2 in the above pic. Jobs 3, 4, 5 an' 6 were added by megui itself.

Edit:- It's on it's fith pass now and ther is NO error reports in the log. It shows each job as complete so far. This is to weird.


Edit2:- It finished at the 6th pass and the video works including on ps3
Don't know why megui is giving me so much greif or why it required 6 passes but it's done.

Anyone know why megui has been behaving like this? Anything I can do to stop it?

[Sharktooth]

bah... never happened something like that...
uninstall megui and do a clean install. update everything to the latest version thru auto-update. remove the unnecessary avisynth filters and try again.

[DL3]

bah... never happened something like that...


I'm sorry to say but it did and it doesn't stop at whats mentioned in the post.

I'd already tried uninstalling and reinstalling. Doesn't make a difference.
It behaves perfect if I'm encoding a normal dvd rip but as soon as I try to encode at 720p resolutions, megui behaves buggy and the results are unpredictable. I eventualy get the file I'm after but it normaly takes a few atempts.

I've had absolute failures for encodes. Massivly distorted with coloured blocking. Re-encode at the same settings and it comes out perfect???

I honestly don't know what going on with it. I've actualy been looking at my hardware and have stress tested it to see if anything was wrong.

Please understand that I'm not running megui down. I love megui. It's all I use. I'm just trying to find a way of stabelising it in my machine with these big encodes.

[nurbs]

It's likely that the fault is somewhere at your end. I'm doing the exact same thing you are doing (720p, <4GB for PS3) and everything works fine.

[jeffy]

What if you posted your logs if there are any?

[DL3]

It's likely that the fault is somewhere at your end.

I think this is highly likely.

I wasn't sure at first if I was asking to much of something.

I've been looking at the hardware I'm using but can't find any problems. Thought perhaps I had a bad ram stick.

I'm looking at windows itself now. Got to be something in there thats bad.

Are there any issues with using it on xp x64 sp2?
Does it rely on any c++ or visual basic components? ( incase something's bad in there. )

What if you posted your logs if there are any?

I'm sorry there are none left to the best of my knowlege ( unless it caches them someware I don't know about ).
The log always shows job complete if thats any help. ( know it isn't sorry :( )

[poisondeathray]

Did you rip the BD correctly? (anydvd)

If you're overclocked, try setting back to default settings for now

Bad ram will usually give you BSOD, but it wouldn't hurt to run memtest64+

PSU faulty?

[DL3]

bd's riped fine m8 and my system is never overclocked. It does produce working files. Just fails and acts nuts alot.

Found this in event viewer/aplication. There's a few of these.

Event Type: Error
Event Source: Application Error
Event Category: (100)
Event ID: 1000
Date: 22/08/2008
Time: 23:10:39
User: N/A
Computer: DIGITALMASTER
Description:
Faulting application MP4Box.exe, version 0.0.0.0, faulting module MP4Box.exe, version 0.0.0.0, fault address 0x0000d482.

[Adub]

Hmm... Is MP4Box 64bit compatible?

[DL3]

Don't know.
For now, I've tested and verified that there is a problem coming from mp4box.
I encoded again, it glitched again. It didn't show the dialog for the second pass. Acted idle again despite megui working the system hard.
I cancled this in process manager.
Checked the event viewer after a reboot and there was another error from mp4box. Also other errors about an error description being missing.
I'm not getting notification that the program had to close or anything. Normaly I should get notice that the process is terminated.

To me, it's looking like megui isn't built to deal with the error coming from mp4box. It's likely why it's acting so strange.

At the moment, I've set mp4box.exe to compatability with windows xp.
By looking at my system itself, I've found my cpu driver and dual core optimiser to be well out of date so i've updated these.

I'm going to encode again to see if any of that helped.

[Sharktooth]

it's more likely your system is acting weird and we cant fix your system... you have to do it by yourself.

[DL3]

it's more likely your system is acting weird and we cant fix your system

Then why am I able to pull up posts through google that people have made about similar problems not only with megui but with mp4box as well. Also, why isn't any other software in my computer giving me problems. Everything else works perfect. Why only megui?

This person has megui hanging in a neverending loop while muxing. Note that the hang he describes is the exact type of hang I see, just at a different point but still while megui is using mp4box.
http://www.videohelp.com/forum/archive/megui-mp4-encoding-problems-t328292.html

This person had problems getting mp4box to mux an mp4 720p file. It was coming out unusable. He to is using a 64 bit os. His solution was to mux in an mkv container. This ones fairly recent.
http://avidemux.org/admForum/viewtopic.php?id=4657

Now, there's plenty more of these out there but I realy don't want to flood the thread full of links. One thing I've noticed is that none of the people who are having problems are using windows xp x86.

you have to do it by yourself.

Which is what I have been doing. I'm keeping this thread going because there is an issue here wither you like it or not and this thread may just help someone.

[Sharktooth]

why there are thousands (or even more) of users that have no problems with it?
sadly we cant fix ppl.
however, try changing the mp4box build... and see if it works. anyways, this is not a megui problem... at most it's a mp4box or microsoft problem, so i really dont know what do you want from us.

[DL3]

why there are thousands (or even more) of users that have no problems with it?


Would like to know that myself. What the differance is. Wouldn't you?

so i really dont know what do you want from us.

Erm, this..

try changing the mp4box build

Thats actualy a good idea and one I'm going to try.

anyways, this is not a megui problem

Correct me if I'm wrong but if megui installs external software that faults in some rare cases, shouldn't it be looked into? What if there is a possibility of a fix?

[Sharktooth]

well, the possibility is that you find a mp4box build that works and doesnt crash silently. so i need your help... ;)
once and if you find it, if it works properly, ill upload it in the megui auto-update server.

[DL3]

Might just have found an answer to this. Need to test more.

Yesterday I downloaded v 0.4.4 and overwrote the file in megui/tools/mp4box.

I have no idea if there is any issues with using this build. Let me make this clear now.

I've encoded 2 720p rips into mp4 container with no problems so far. I odviously need to encode a few more times to confirm this but it does look promising. ( thats if there are no other known issues with it. )

[Sharktooth]

megui already uses 0.4.4... what's the date or revision of your build?
howevever, post a link to it so i can get it.

[DL3]

Srry. I thought by the date show in the update dialog, megui was using 0.4.5 dev. Logic was to try and get a lesser version.


Anyway, don't have a build no for this one but its dated as 3/june/2007.

Downloaded from the authers toolbox.

http://kurtnoise.free.fr/mp4tools/

Edit:- If it helps any, the one I downloaded was 0.01mb ( 1.24mb compaired to 1.25mb) larger than the one I replaced.

[Sharktooth]

uhm... that build had other issues...

[DL3]

Yeh, I noticed.

Perhaps a build in between then, if there's such a thing. Need to check.

BTW, do you have any objection to me trying the 0.4.5 dev build?

[Sharktooth]

no objections, start from the latest

[DL3]

I've used MP4Box 0.4.5 dev build 20080201 msvc6

Got it from here.

http://www.digital-digest.com/software/download.php?sid=1487&ssid=0&did=1

I got a very succesfull encode using this version.

I encoded another blue ray disk rip ( main m2ts file of 22+ gig ).
It not only encoded without hastle but the resulting quality and detail retention is very impressive. ( had turbo disabled for this one though. )

This time I watched the result before posting so there are definatly no poor quality scenes or errors in this one like there was in the last two.

Am going to encode again. :)

[Sharktooth]

ok, ill test that build but from what i see it's the same as the kurtnoise's 2008-02-01 build i had to replace coz it had problems...
if you look at the auto-update (mp4box entry... focus on the version) you will notice it...

[DL3]

Thats why I thought megui was using the dev build in the first place.
If it has problems, it has problems. I've only done one encode with it. Pitty though.

Ok, so, I've found a more recent build. Dated 13th april 2008.

It's on the same page as that older 0.4.4 build. The tool site.

I'm going to try that one. Was actualy lucky I checked here before starting my next encode.

[EuropeanMan]

i am also having problems with MeGUI lately

i have a core2duo lappy @ 1.83ghz; 3GB ram, 320gb hd

i just got the laptop almost 10 days ago...i d/led everything i neeed (minus the MT stuff); i'm using avisynth 2.5.8 as i have since it was released w/out problems...i even ripped my DVD9s wihtout ANY hassle until this past few days...everytime i start a rip (with first line - setmemorymax(1024) it eats up all my processing power - i even checked - 98%!!!!! i used to be able to surf the net comfortably; even open other apps and run them without any problem...NOW, no matter if it's x264 or xVid - same thing...i can't do anything else, but wait for it to finish...

also, last TWO days, when i start UP megui, i get an error from windows! rundll32 has stopped working!


PS - one MORE thing; my rips used to run at 25fps or so...for the first hour; and in the past it would continue to do so all the way through...maybe at the END of the 2nd pass, it MIGHT even DROP to 22fps...no big deal...but NOW?!!!! it goes to 7 or 8fps! WHY.......grrrrrrrrrr
can someone please enlighten me...what can i do?

PPS - why the heck was that jaworsky x264 profile updating ALMOST EVERY DAY LIKE EVERY 6 HOURS?!!!

[Sharktooth]

lower the priority (status window)... however it's quite normal it eats all the CPU cycles, encoders do that all the time.
however by lowering the priority to the lowest your system will be much more responsive.
about the rundll32 i dont know... megui runs on top of the .net framework and does not need rundll32...
the x264 encoding slowdown is due to an x264 update which enables trellis for p8x8 partitions. that will result in a higher quality though. disable trellis or use trellis 1 and try to avoid subme 7 to mitigate the slowdown. In practice, dont use insane presets. anywas your slowdown is just crazy. something's wrong on your system.
who the h*ll is jaworsky?

however all of those are not megui problems.

[EuropeanMan]

^ it doesn't matter WHAT option of priority i use...still eats up ALL MY PROCESSING POWER...

at present, just uninstalled, and re-installing! :( man this sucks...

[Sharktooth]

it will always eat all your processing power... it has been always like that and it wont change.
ALL ENCODERS DO THAT FROM AGES... ooops SINCE THEY EXIST!

[EuropeanMan]

yes but before it never did it like this! when i set aside 1/3 of my memory; i was STILL able to comfortably run other apps without any hassles...

ok, i just uninstalled, and reinstalled fresh...just started my rip again...seems so far that it is happy now - meaning my computer...i'm typing this with ease instead of waiting every few seconds to type the next letter!

[Sharktooth]

yes, it did... just set the priority to lower and it will be the same as before.
if you still encounter system unresponsiveness than it's due to some other thing. check your system for viruses/spywares... etc...

[EuropeanMan]

^ i had done a complete scan last nite - i have not gotten infected with anything :(

[Sharktooth]

well, i can run megui on a single core CPU with x264 encoding and still surf the web, watch movies or even compiling softwares... there should be something weird happening on your system.

[Yoshiyuki Blade]

...everytime i start a rip (with first line - setmemorymax(1024) it eats up all my processing power

Remove setmemorymax and see how it turns out. My lappy had issues with the latest avisynth and setmemorymax. Removing it made things seem more stable.

[Adub]

@EuropeanMan

Let me explain something to you. Encoder use all available processing power. That is what they are SUPPOSED do!!

Setting a lower priority will still let it run at as fast as it can, sometimes showing 98% processor usage or whatever, but you can run other apps with no slow down whatsoever. You can surf the net, watch movies, or whatever else. The only trade off is that instead of the processor cycles being devoted almost entirely to x264, they are spread out between x264, firefox, outlook, Media Player Classic, and whatever else you have running.


The reason your encodes have slowed down is because you are using HIGHER QUALITY SETTINGS (to use your yelling/capitalization techniques). There is and always will be a trade off in speed vs quality. If you don't like the slow down, use crappier settings.


And the profiles were being updated because they were GETTING BETTER. And who the hell is jaworsky? Sharktooth makes the profiles.

x264 was being updated because it was....guess what....GETTING BETTER!!

[EuropeanMan]

^ yeah u right :) it wasn't jaworsky- it was jarod i think LOL

megui is fine now after the re-install...

[Adub]

Good to hear.

[EuropeanMan]

Quick question Merlin - by Higher Quality settings, did you mean my scripting (avs)?

[Adub]

Well, in that original post, I meant in you x264 profile. Several improvements over the past month have been made to certain settings, such as b-frames, subme 6 and 7, trellis, psyrdo, etc, that have improved quality, but lowered speed. This could be why, when you update to the latest x264, you think, Hey! Where did all my speed go?! I am using the same settings!!!

The fact is that yes, you are using the same settings, but you are getting better quality out of them.

However, you script has something to do with it as well. Depending on what filters you use, your speed can very wildly.