AVXsynth isn't working

[Katie Boundary]

On my Linux system, I've successfully compiled and installed AVXsynth. I've dumped the relevant filters (DGdecode and TIVTC) into the AVXsynth plugins directory. I've adjusted the paths in the .D2V files to match where Linux thinks the VOB files are. And... it still doesn't work. Here's an example of the error:

VLC can't recognize the input's format:
The format of 'file:///media/wds/Northrend/Ripped/Video/Stargate%20SG-1/401.avs' cannot be detected. Have a look at the log for details.

(Northrend is one of my external hard drives)

I also don't know what log file it's looking for.

[qyot27]

1) AvxSynth does not support Windows .dll plugins. And there were only ever maybe 5 or 6 plugins ever ported to it natively. The only source filter for AvxSynth is FFMS2 (clone from the upstream FFMS2 repo, checkout the c_plugin branch, and use --enable-shared --enable-avxsynth), and you have to have a libavformat-based player that was built with --enable-avisynth (FFmpeg) or --enable-avxsynth (Libav; requires AvxSynth to have been installed first).

2) VLC force-disables AviSynth support in their FFmpeg contrib Makefile (I have no idea why; the mailing list email doesn't say anything specific about why it got disabled, except musing about static linking and writing what would be a third demuxer for it, although I'm not sure if they were aware of that). You have to override that when building VLC manually, and then hope there's nothing else that explicitly blocks it from working correctly, like weird dynamic loading rules or rejecting plaintext files as input.


AvxSynth development has been dead for 3+ years now, and still exists mostly as a novelty - its one legitimate achievement was correctly rewriting the AviSynth demuxer in libavformat to be sane. At least on Ubuntu and Debian, ffmpeg (and ffplay by extension), enables support for it by default, and the repo mpv build it's linked against should be able to open the scripts as well. But there's not really much AvxSynth can do, as you're limited to the core filters (many of which had their assembly disabled, so they'll probably be slower than their Windows counterparts). And since it's a port of AviSynth 2.5.8, there's no support for YV24, YV16, Y8, or YV411.

Use VapourSynth if you need native support, or use AviSynth+ under Wine and pipe out to native encoders if you need existing plugins and scripts to work.

[Katie Boundary]

Originally Posted by qyot27

VLC force-disables AviSynth support in their FFmpeg contrib Makefile

The scripts weren't working in Tsunami MPEG Encoder (running through Wine) either.

Originally Posted by qyot27

AvxSynth development has been dead for 3+ years now

Is that why the installation instructions refer to ffmpeg 0.11 when the latest version is 3.4?

[qyot27]

Originally Posted by Katie Boundary

The scripts weren't working in Tsunami MPEG Encoder (running through Wine) either.

Wine only talks to the host system through pipes, so of course AvxSynth wouldn't work with it. You have to install a Windows build of AviSynth under Wine to have Wine programs recognize it directly.

Is that why the installation instructions refer to ffmpeg 0.11 when the latest version is 3.4?

Yup. Although those instructions were outdated for a while before AvxSynth died, too.

[Katie Boundary]

Originally Posted by qyot27

Wine only talks to the host system through pipes

So you're saying Wine is...



...a series of tubes?

Originally Posted by qyot27

You have to install a Windows build of AviSynth under Wine to have Wine programs recognize it directly.

Wait, what? That's POSSIBLE? But AVIsynth isn't an executable that you can run. It just sort of sits in the background and tricks the OS into treating text files as video files. Are you saying that, if I run the installer through Wine once, AVIsynth itself will forever run through Wine without me needing to tell Linux to do that?

Edit: it appears to work, in the sense that AVIsynth is at least functional enough to be reporting errors of its own. The main problem now seems to be getting the D2V files to point at the VOB files in a way that ALL of the relevant software can understand. When I use "D:\ripped\video\etc", then Tsunami gives a "cannot open, or unsupported" error. When I use "/media/wds/Northrend/ripped/video/etc", then AVIsynth says "MPEG2source: could not open one of the input files". Is this fixable?

Edit 2: I tried just dumping the ripped files, the d2v file, and the avs file into .wine/drive_c/Ripped/ and pointing the d2v file there, and OMG IT WORKED! This is a slightly impractical workaround, however, because vob files are huge and my .wine folder is on a tiny 80gb hard drive. I'll see what other workarounds I can try.