Avisynth not opening video

[julesh]

Doing a new installation of everything on a new virtual machine, and I'm having trouble getting avisynth to work.

Very simple script:


DirectShowSource("video.avi")


Video plays fine when I drop it into media player classic. When I drop the .avs file on instead, I get no video, although MPC does know how long the video is, so something's happening at least.

Video is an XVid file, which I have set up to be handled via ffdshow.

Avisynth 2.5.8. ffdshow-20041012-sse2.exe. MPC 6.4.8.2.

When ffdshow was installed, I turned on the 'avisynth support' in the special programs support section of the installer.

Any ideas what might be going wrong?

[julesh]

I've just installed an original xvid codec, and it doesn't work using that either.

[julesh]

And have now found where to get latest ffdshow from, so have just tried with ffdshow beta 6.

[julesh]

Stranger and strange.

The following script also produces no video output:


DirectShowSource("video.avi")
Info()


But this script causes MPC to crash with no error messages:


DirectShowSource("video.avi")
AddBorders(0,0,400,400)
Info()


Whereas this one produces an error message:


DirectShowSource("video.avi")
BilinearResize(400,400)
Info()


-> "Resize: Source image too small for this resize method. Width=0, Support=1"

[Wilbert]

Use AviSource.

[julesh]

Hmmm. OK, that works. But... I've been using DirectShowSource for years (and will now have to go and fix the software I use for autogeneration of my scripts). What's changed?

[squid_80]

DirectShowSource should only be considered as a fallback method for opening .avi files when AVISource doesn't work.

[Blue_MiSfit]

Give DSS2 a try also, it's a lot better than DirectShowSource IMO :)

The DLL for it is AVSS.dll from Haali media splitter's install directory.

~MiSfit

[julesh]

Thanks.

For reference, the problem was caused by me not having a sound card installed. I guess AviSynth's DirectShowSource was getting confused while trying to build the filter graph and not having a sound card to connect the audio to (??? not sure why it would try doing this, but installing a sound card definitely made it work).