Avisynth under Linux?

[tedkunich]

Does anyone know if Avisynth will run under Linux running Wine (Winbloze API emmulator for Linux)? Would like to give MS the heave-ho and switch over to Linux at home, as we are doing the same here at work. I have heard that were some steps had been taken to port Avisynth to Linux, but as an interim, would it run under Wine?


Thanks,

T

[frodoontop]

I tried it once and basically it works. But please do consider some native apps like mencoder for encoding. That is far more stable.

[shevegen]

it works??
hehe i never actually tried but this rox :>

oh, while i use mencoder as well, i just love the flexibility of avisynth

[Sirber]

avisynth uses directshow. how can it works under linux? wine does not "emulate" it yet IIRC.

[albertgasset]

Originally posted by Sirber
avisynth uses directshow. how can it works under linux? wine does not "emulate" it yet IIRC.

I think it uses DirectShow only in the DirectShowSource plugin. Avisynth works under Wine, but it's very unstable: only works well with simple scripts and filters.

[akupenguin]

avisynth uses directshow
There are DirectShow, VfW, C++, and C interfaces for Avisynth. All except DirectShow work for me.

Avisynth works under Wine, but it's very unstable: only works well with simple scripts and filters.
Unstable?
I've encountered exactly one problem: If there's anything wrong with an avisynth script (typo, forgot to load a plugin, etc), I get a crash instead of an error message.
But any complicated script that works under Windows will also work under Wine. And while I'm sure one could write a filter that didn't work under Wine (DLLs can contain arbitrary code, after all), I haven't encountered any.

My versions:
Wine 20040615
Avisynth 2.5.2
Avisynth C Interface 0.14 (for piping output to mencoder)
VirtualDub 1.5.10 (only for previewing / frame stepping)
MEncoder CVS

[MrTibs]

I am quite interested in a more detailed description on just how you got everthing installed and working [on Linux].

You don't need to be completely accurate (sometimew we forget how we did something) but a "Avisynth on Linux" HowTO would be great! I for one have stayed with Windows only because of Avisynth, if I can do all my video stuff on Linux, I'll jump ASAP.

[madluther]

Search this forum, there are detailed instructions on getting avisynth working, the instructions are about a year old but they are still relevant.

HTH
Mad.

[patxitron]

Sorry about my english,

To get avisynth working in wine I installed wine from sources as non-root (it request root password in some stage of installation) and I told it to make a fake windows setup.

Next step is to customice ~/.wine/dosdevices. After that simply run avisynth installer.

Then I install VirtualDub and some codec (DivX 5, huffyuv) in order to test avisynth scripts.

Tested versions: Avisynth 2.5.3, VirtualDub 1.5.10, wine-20040716

Now I can't get avisynth 2.5.5 working in wine-20040914 maybe because I'm running a unstable nptl and gcc-3.4 based optimized gentoo linux :D .

EDIT:

Originally posted by akupenguin
Avisynth C Interface 0.14 (for piping output to mencoder)


I'm very inetrested in how to piping output to mencoder. Can you explain it, please?

Thanks

[akupenguin]

While you can load Avisynth scripts in VirtualDub under Wine, I find the graphical interface cumbersome, and I would have to rely on the binary distributions of ffdshow rather than my own builds of MEncoder from CVS. Also, Wine (my setup at least) doesn't support files bigger than 4GB even on an ext3 partition, while MEncoder doesn't support multiple input files.

So I wrote a simple program than can read AVS and write raw video to a pipe: Avs2YUV (http://students.washington.edu/lorenm/src/avisynth/avs2yuv/)

Thus I can:
wine avs2yuv.exe foo.avs - | mencoder - -o foo.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts mbd=2:trell:v4mv:vqscale=2

[patxitron]

Thank you very much.

I'm now compiling a stable version of my gentoo. I will try your app as soon as I get avisynth working with wine again. :p

[patxitron]

I tested your app using wine-20040813 and avisynth-2.5.5 on gentoo-2004.2 with this simple script:
File: Prueba.avs
ColorBars(720, 576)
AssumeFPS(25.0)
ConvertToYV12()
info()


Xvid (or ffdshow) codec must be installed to allow avs2YUV or any other app to import YV12 data from avisynth.

I piped it to mplayer-1.0pre5 and It works.

I get the image that I was expecting but I get it only at arround 2fps on my Pentium 4 3GHz. Is It normal? What can I do in order to improve performance?

This is the command line that I was used: 'wine avs2yuv "x:\Prueba.avs" - | mplayer -ao null -'

I'm unable to load this script into Virtualdub (it segfaults or shows it's crash and debug window). I tested version 1.5.10 and 1.5.4. I don't know why virtuldub crashes. A few months ago it worked almost perfectly this way.

[akupenguin]

I confirm that that script runs at 1.5 fps (AMD Barton 2500). (It does so also in VirtualDub.) But if I remove the "info()", it then runs at 110 fps.
I haven't noticed any performance problems with real scripts. (Not that I've ever run them under Windows to compare, but the speeds seem reasonable based on discussions with my friend encoders.)

And I can't get Avisynth >= 2.5.3 to do anything. It immediately crashes Wine if I either run avs2yuv or load an avs in vdub.

[patxitron]

Yes, it's true. Removing the "info()" line it boosts it's speed. I don't remember this "slowness" in windows but it seems to me that text rendering is not a complete success with avisynth under wine.

I tested a simple 'subtilte("hello world")' instead of the "info()" line and it is not slow, but the text is so small that it is unreadabe. Even I tryed 'Subtitle("Hello world", size=100)' and the text size remains equaly small.

Btw, I'm very happy because I can finally pipe frames from avisynth to a linux native app.

Thank you very much akupenguin.

P.D.: The Avisynth version that I'm running with your app is 2.5.5 (I just tested it in command history to be sure) but VirtualDub crashes if I load an avs script into it.

EDIT: I just tested another script. The simple line 'LoadPlugin("C:\Video\Avisynth\undot.dll")' at the top of file, causes that avs2yuv throws: 'err:seh:setup_exception stack overflow 124 bytes in thread 0009 eip 401feac0 esp 40800f84 stack 0x40800000-0x40a0000'.
Maybe our efforts are better invested in some native apps like gstreamer?

[akupenguin]

Originally posted by patxitron
The simple line 'LoadPlugin("C:\Video\Avisynth\undot.dll")' at the top of file, causes that avs2yuv throws: 'err:seh:setup_exception stack overflow 124 bytes in thread 0009 eip 401feac0 esp 40800f84 stack 0x40800000-0x40a0000'. That's just the generic error message: Something went wrong somewhere, but my program is written in C, so couldn't catch the C++ exception. I think.
Maybe our efforts are better invested in some native apps like gstreamer? If you mean, a real port of Avisynth with a gstreamer plugin, then sure. Right after I finish x264 ;).

[Wilbert]

If you mean, a real port of Avisynth with a gstreamer plugin
Just be patience till AviSynth v3.0 is out :) I'm sure that the devs appreciate some help if you are interested!

[patxitron]

Oh yes. A Linux native Avisynth with gstreamer source, filter and sink plugins will be great.

Avisynth 3 is a very interesting project but it seems not to have activity in the groups from July.

Lamentably I am not a capable programmer, nor I have long free time, although I am trying to learn C, C++ and Pyhton.

[Wilbert]

Avisynth 3 is a very interesting project but it seems not to have activity in the groups from July.

It's very active. But the progress is not discussed here, but on IRC:

#avisynth @freenode

[evade]

Hi,

I have been attempting to use avs2yuv and can't seem to get the desired results.

All the windows programs work and I can get VirtualDubMod to load the avs files.

avs2yuv works fine for me unless I try to pipe the output. That is it will write raw video to a file which can be processed correctly by mplayer/mencoder.

however if I try to pipe the output or use a fifo I get the following error:

$ wine ~/avs2yuv/avs2yuv.exe db.avs - | mplayer - -ao null 2>/dev/null >/dev/null
db.avs
fixme:avifile:AVIFileInit (): stub!
total frames: 36272
Output error: wrote only 327595 of 345600 bytes
wine: Unhandled exception (thread 0015), starting debugger...


I have tried this with Crossover Office 3.0 and with wine 20040914


Any thoughts?

[akupenguin]

Originally posted by evade
$ wine ~/avs2yuv/avs2yuv.exe db.avs - | mplayer - -ao null 2>/dev/null >/dev/null
No need for -ao null, avs2yuv doesn't produce any audio. But that shouldn't cause an error.
It looks like mplayer just read 320KB and then stopped. Can you post a version including mplayer's output?

[evade]

all output:


$ wine ~/avs2yuv/avs2yuv.exe db.avs - | mplayer -
MPlayer dev-CVS-041005-11:18-3.3.4 (C) 2000-2004 MPlayer Team

CPU: Intel Pentium 4/Xeon/Celeron Foster 2193 MHz (Family: 8, Stepping: 4)
Detected cache-line size is 64 bytes
CPUflags: MMX: 1 MMX2: 1 3DNow: 0 3DNow2: 0 SSE: 1 SSE2: 1
Compiled for x86 CPU with extensions: MMX MMX2 SSE SSE2

Reading config file /usr/local/etc/mplayer/mplayer.conf: No such file or directory
Reading config file /home/dave/.mplayer/config
Reading /home/dave/.mplayer/codecs.conf: Can't open '/home/dave/.mplayer/codecs.conf': No such file or directory
Reading /usr/local/etc/mplayer/codecs.conf: Can't open '/usr/local/etc/mplayer/codecs.conf': No such file or directory
Using built-in default codecs.conf.
font: can't open file: /home/dave/.mplayer/font/font.desc
Font /usr/local/share/mplayer/font/font.desc loaded successfully! (206 chars)
Failed to open /dev/rtc: No such file or directory (it should be readable by the user.)
Using nanosleep() timing
Can't open input config file /home/dave/.mplayer/input.conf: No such file or directory
Can't open input config file /usr/local/etc/mplayer/input.conf: No such file or directory
Falling back on default (hardcoded) input config

Playing -.
Reading from stdin...
db.avs
fixme:avifile:AVIFileInit (): stub!
YUV4MPEG2 file format detected.
YUV4MPEG2 Video stream 0 size: display: 720x480, codec: 720x480
VIDEO: [YV12] 720x480 12bpp 23.976 fps 0.0 kbps ( 0.0 kbyte/s)
vo: X11 running at 1024x768 with depth 24 and 32 bpp (":0.0" => local display)
Disabling DPMS
==========================================================================
Opening video decoder: [raw] RAW Uncompressed Video
VDec: vo config request - 720 x 480 (preferred csp: Planar YV12)
VDec: using Planar YV12 as output csp (no 0)
Movie-Aspect is undefined - no prescaling applied.
VO: [xv] 720x480 => 720x480 Planar YV12
Selected video codec: [rawyv12] vfm:raw (RAW YV12)
==========================================================================
Audio: no sound
Starting playback...
total frames: 36272
V: 0.0 0 0% 0% 0.0% 0 0 0%
Successfully enabled DPMS

Exiting... (End of file)
Output error: wrote only 327595 of 345600 bytes
wine: Unhandled exception (thread 0043), starting debugger...

[akupenguin]

What happens if you play a smaller video? (e.g. resize to 320x240 at the end of the avs)
What about a named pipe?
$ mkfifo fifo.yuv ; wine avs2yuv.exe db.avs fifo.yuv &; mplayer fifo.yuv

The only relevant option I can think of is MPlayer's cache size. Try mplayer -cache 1024.

[evade]

The cache option made no difference but the named pipe seems to work.

Thanks.

[evade]

OK.

Now that I can use avisynth with mencoder what does it do for me. What useful filters and plugins are there with avisynth that I can't do with mencoder.

Is the decomb filter superior to -vf pp=lb or -vf pp=md. There certainly seem to be a lot of denoisers available to avisynth. how do they compare to hqdn3d?


What procedure would you use?

Something like this? :

mplayer -dumpstream -dumpfile movie.vob dvd://1
dvdxchap /dev/dvd > movie.txt

Create a d2v file with dvd2avidg and decode the stream to wav
Create an avs file

mkfifo fifo.yuv

inter="12,11,12,12,13,14,15,16,11,11,12,12,13,14,14,16,12,12,12,13,14,15,16,17,12,12,13,15,16,17,18,18,13,13,14,16,18,19,19,20,14,14,,15,17,19,20,22,22,15,14,16,18,19,22,23,24,16,16,17,18,20,22,24,24"
intra="08,11,12,12,13,15,16,17,11,11,12,12,14,15,16,17,12,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,12,12,14,16,17,18,19,19,13,14,15,17,19,20,20,20,15,15,16,18,20,21,22,22,16,16,17,19,21,22,23,24,17,17,18,19,20,22,24,24"
lavcoptions="lumi_mask=0.05:dark_mask=0.01:autoaspect:mbd=2:mv0:trell:cbp:precmp=2:cmp=2:subcmp=2:vmax_b_frames=1:predia=2:dia=2:preme=2:vme=5:naq:v4mv:inter_matrix=${inter}:intra_matrix=${intra}"

bitrate=1800

oggenc -q3 -o movie.ogg "movie AC3 T01 2_0ch 192Kbps DELAY -81ms.wav"
rm "movie AC3 T01 2_0ch 192Kbps DELAY -81ms.wav"

wine avs2yuv.exe movie.avs fifo.yuv & mencoder -mc 0 -noskip -nosound -ovc lavc -o movie.avi -lavcopts vpass=1:vbitrate=${bitrate}:${lavcoptions} fifo.yuv
wine avs2yuv.exe movie.avs fifo.yuv & mencoder -mc 0 -noskip -nosound -ovc lavc -o movie.avi -lavcopts vpass=2:vbitrate=${bitrate}:${lavcoptions} fifo.yuv

"mkvmerge" -o "movie.mkv" --display-dimensions 0:720x540 -d 0 -A -S movie.avi --sync 0:-81 -a 0 -D -S movie.ogg --chapters movie.txt

[akupenguin]

Originally posted by evade
Now that I can use avisynth with mencoder what does it do for me? What useful filters and plugins are there with avisynth that I can't do with mencoder?
Apply different filters to different sections of the movie.
Variable framerate. (Actually, avisynth doesn't natively support this, but I can ivtc some sections and not others, and then merge it with an appropriate matroska timecode file.)
And, of course, the huge variety of plugins.

As a filter writer, I also like the ability to reference arbitrary input frames, whereas mplayer's vf system only allows knowledge of previous frames.

Is the decomb filter superior to -vf pp=lb or -vf pp=md?
Decomb is an inverse telecine filter, not a deinterlacer. Unaided, it isn't any better than -vf detc, but decomb supports manual overrides for when it gets the matches wrong.

I refuse to deal with interlaced content, but still have to deinterlace occasional single frames when good ivtc isn't possible. in which case I use a combination of sangnom and/or kerneldeint.

There certainly seem to be a lot of denoisers available to avisynth. how do they compare to hqdn3d?
It depends on what kind of noise you're removing. For plain gaussian noise or film grain, hqdn3d is good, except at very high strengths where it causes ghosting. (I ported hqdn3d to avisynth so that I could use it in the middle of a filter chain.) For high strengths, nothing is going to be perfect, but you could try a motion-compensated denoiser, like Dust. For rainbows, dotcrawl, flicker, or other specialized distortions, there are much better filters available to avisynth.

What procedure would you use?
I use something very much like that.
Differences:
vobcopy instead of mplayer -dumpstream. (but it shouldn't matter)
dvd2avi 1.77 instead of dvd2avidg. (I haven't done a comparison myself, but I trust Zhentarim on this point.)
and I could nitpick your lavc options, but that's a separate matter.

If I do lots of processing in the avs, it can be more efficient to run the script only once, and save the result to huffyuv. (But for a fast avs, it's not worth it.)
wine avs2yuv.exe movie.avs fifo.yuv & mencoder -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=huffyuv:vstrict=-1:pred=2 fifo.yuv -o hfyu.avi
and then run two passes from hfyu.avi

[Wilbert]

dvd2avi 1.77 instead of dvd2avidg. (I haven't done a comparison myself, but I trust Zhentarim on this point.)
Could you elaborate? What's wrong with dvd2avidg?

[akupenguin]

I hear occasional reports of missing frames or inconsistent seeking with dg.

[evade]

Decomb is an inverse telecine filter, not a deinterlacer. Unaided, it isn't any better than -vf detc, but decomb supports manual overrides for when it gets the matches wrong.[/B]


Actually Decomb can do either, I just double checked. Although it seems it is not the best deinterlacer. When I encounter Interlaced source I generally leave it interlaced and encode it as such (and play it back on an NTSC TV via mplayer in Xbox Media Center). I will sometimes deinterlace DV video to share with friends and family running windows, who don't know about playback filters.

I have had some good success processing poorly telecined or telecined then edited source with Richard Felker's pullup filter in a filter chain like this.

-vf pullup,softskip,crop -ofps 24000/1001

or sometimes

-vf filmdint:crop=,softskip -ofps 24000/1001

I believe pullup was written with a variable framerate engine (MPlayer G2) in mind.


vobcopy instead of mplayer -dumpstream. (but it shouldn't matter)


Vobcopy must no longer have problems with angles?


and I could nitpick your lavc options, but that's a separate matter.


I would love your input (If you have time).
I haven't encountered anyone on the MPlayer mailing lists that uses custom matrices with lavc mpeg4 but I have been quite happy with the results.

[akupenguin]

My favorite lavc options, found by a genetic algorithm optimizing PSNR vs speed, include:
preme=2:precmp=0:cmp=2:subcmp=6:predia=3:dia=-1:last_pred=2

I prefer using vqscale=2 on the first pass, rather than vbitrate. Much of time there's little difference, but on some movies involving a mix of very high-motion and low-motion scenes, CBR can screw up the quants and produce a very innacurate prediction.

vme=5 does nothing; it's completely identical to vme=4, which is the default.

And if you're willing to spend lots of CPU time, add qns=2 on the second pass, to reduce ringing artifacts. (It's slow, but you can skip it on the first pass at no cost to final quality.)

[echo]

What is the speed difference between using mencoder only or avisynth+mencoder? I would guess that using avisynth slows things down but I don't really know and I don't have avisynth installed. Has anyone made any tests?

[mkaluza]

Well that depends on the script of course;) but simple AviSource piped to mencoder is not bad - slower than mencoder alone but I got realtime playback.

[mkaluza]

Has anyone managed to run avs2yuv without X server running? I need to do some automatic background encoding of my captures and it must be independent from the X server since it's run from cron.
greetz

[evade]

you could run a minimal vncserver and set your display to that. Or look into an X frame buffer. I had to run tomcat with a frambuffer to produce images on a server without an X display before java supported headless awt.

[akupenguin]

1) Does it really need to be independent of X? You can run X programs from cron by setting DISPLAY=:0.0 (or whatever).

2) Wine without X is kinda broken, but still doable:
in ~/.wine/config, find a line like
"GraphicsDriver" = "x11drv"
and change it to
"GraphicsDriver" = "ttydrv"
(Sorry, I don't know how to do it for just this one program, other than duplicating the config file and specifying WINEPREFIX.)
ttydrv seems to mess up piping, so you might need to use a named fifo rather than stdout.

[hulkenstrong]

couldnt anyone of you point me to the thread that explaines howto install avisynth?

I tried some basic searching but was unable to locate it and I would like to try my favorite encoding combination under linux. quenc + avisynth. Using that combination I am able to encode a whole movie in less then 15 minutes. So far no program have even come near that and I would like to have to skip the restart just for some encoding.

[akupenguin]

wine AviSynth_255.exe

[hulkenstrong]

does not work for me. Altough I do use cvswinex not regular wine. So you have tested and know that it works with regular wine? Since not many games work well since I have ati gfx I might just switch back to wine instead.

Thanks for the reply.

[akupenguin]

It works for me with regular wine 20040615 (I haven't bothered to upgrade since then.)

[hulkenstrong]

well just installed version 20041019 that had been compiled for my distribution. Did install now but everytime I try to open the avs in quenc it just crashes :(. Well Ill keep on trying to se if its quenc or avisynth that doesnt work alright.

One step closer thou (also tried for fun to have both wine/winex installed seem to work. Could problem arise due to it?)

[mkaluza]

I'm running it on 20041019 and it works. The crashes occur when there's an error in the scripts (or any other - file not found/colorspace not matching etc). What I do is:
- run VirtualDub 1.6.0 (build 21540/release) under wine
- go to Options->Preferences->Display and turn off 'Use DirectX' to prevent screen distortion
- open avs file just like in windows - if anything is wrong with the script, the error message will bo displayed (instead of a crash :)
- if everything' ok, I use avs2yuv to pipe everything to mencoder (via a fifo file, normal pipes don't work for me)
Hope this helps

[hulkenstrong]

tried using latest vdub 1.6.1 and well get the same behaviour. Even if the script only contains the location to the movie. Will try with a sample file located at wines C: to se if it somehow cant even find the file.

Edit: I have tried many things now and all led to wine/virtualdub crashing. Virtualdub alone works but everytime I try to open the avisynth it just closes.

[patxitron]

Try using avisynth 2.5.2 or older.

[hulkenstrong]

Tried version 2.08

When i use avisource to load a file it says it cant find compatible audio format and switching to dx source just crashes both quenc and vdub (quenc did also display the error message when using avisource.).

Switching back to latest version of avisynth crashes bot quenc and vdub imeditly when using dx or avisource.

Maybe Im missing some more files that avisynth needs under wine to be able to emulate? codecs, files? suggestions are welcomned and vill be tried.

Installed so far is ffdshow/xvid/visualbasciruntime6 and some other files needed by other programs Ive tried.

avisynth script:
---------------------
AVISource("C:\1.avi")
---------------------

Same files opens fine in virtualdub under wine.

[akupenguin]

The suggestion was 2.5.2, not 2.0.x
It's quite possible that you don't have the appropriate audio codec installed under Wine. (Does Vdub even try to decode audio by default?)

But then, I've never used avisynth for anything audio related. The only source videos I've tried are: audioless avi+mpeg4/huffyuv/ffv1 (decoded with ffvfw), or DVDs (via mpeg2dec3).

[hulkenstrong]

yes vdub detects audio properly as mp3 even says its vbr. And he said 2.5.2 OR older.

Edit: tried version 2.5.2. Same errors. Got qurios and tried to demux video and feed that to quenc/avisynth. Worked verry vell and good speed. I wich I could fix the audio problem as it seemes atleast possible to get it working.

Edit2: Changed the audio to PCM. It encodes great then. Does this look like what I need is a mp3 codec to be able to open avis with mp3 using avisynth or something else?

But audio sounds avfull after encoded. maybe missing proper pcm codec to?

[akupenguin]

Just remembered: VirtualDub has its own mp3 decoder. You'll probably need a separate one for avisynth.

[akupenguin]

Originally posted by mkaluza
open avs file just like in windows - if anything is wrong with the script, the error message will bo displayed (instead of a crash :)
Fixed. Avs2yuv now catches and prints avisynth exceptions.

[shevegen]

What is the status of the "Avisynth under Linux"?
I can use wine and avisynth?

Would test it but have a lot of other things to do, maybe
someone can briefly say if this is an acceptable
solution (avisynth ruled,one of the very few apps i miss now on linux, along with some big-hitter like gordian knot)

[akupenguin]

The status is: Avisynth 2.5.2 (http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/avisynth2/AviSynth_252.exe?download) works perfectly under Wine. Later versions do not.
I wrote avs2yuv (http://students.washington.edu/lorenm/src/avisynth/avs2yuv/) for easy interface to mencoder (http://mplayerhq.hu), but virtualdub (http://virtualdub.org/) works too.

[shevegen]

Cool!!

[AlexeyS]

I wonder is there any Avisynth/Wine/Plugins installation tutorial and usage tutorial for this for noobs?

[Wilbert]

I wonder is there any Avisynth/Wine/Plugins installation tutorial and usage tutorial for this for noobs?
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=746967#post746967 and the rest of the thread.