MeGUI - mencoder x264/snow/mpeg4/XviD GUI with AAC encoding and MP4 output

[Doom9]

@hpn: I'm still a bit concerned about your .NET 2.0 but thanks for testing. Let's hope mencoder acts the same way on my box.. 5000 frames is something I can work with for tests (I did my testing with 1000 frames).

[JoeBG]

@hpn

That´s a better testing than my one. Hope it helps doom9 to find the mistake

[hpn]

Originally posted by Doom9
@hpn: I'm still a bit concerned about your .NET 2.0 but thanks for testing.

I downgraded to .NET 1.1 and tried again with the same test setup. This time MeGUI for all tests with 5001 or more frames doesn't crash with an error message, but the status window simply freezes at 50 frames and mencoder.exe stops working at the background. I press "abort", then close MeGUI and mencoder.exe resumes at 100%. Short clips work fine again. A small correction to the previous post: It's actually 5001, not 5000 as I overlooked the fact that frame number starts from "0", so trim(0,5000) in the avs file actually feeds 5001 frames to mencoder, not 5000.

So in brief: - asv with trim(0,1), trim(0,2), trim(0,3) ... trim(0,4998), trim(0,4999) works fine, and mysteriously stops working for trim(0,5000), trim(0,5001), trim(0,5002) ...

[JoeBG]

Originally posted by hpn
I ... but the status window simply freezes at 50 frames and mencoder.exe stops working at the background. I press "abort", then close MeGUI and mencoder.exe resumes at 100%. Short clips work fine again.

That´s exactly my experience. Freezing after 50 frames...

[Doom9]

Freezing after 50 frames...

Alright, that's the point where I make the first GUI update. That gives me a pretty good idea of what I'm looking for. As I'm quite busy these days, perhaps if you could post a progress line (mencoder writes a line that indicates its progress... like fps, the number of frames encoded) from a clip that works and one that doesn't (I take it you can take any version of mencoder and as long as it's a short clip it'll work, correct) that'd be great.

[tiki4]

Just wanted to confirm that the problem really is triggered by the 5000 frames limit.

Trim(0,4999) -> works

Trim(0,5000) -> works not

Cheers,

tiki4

[hpn]

I also tried some ASP encodes (instead of AVC), using both CBR or 2-pass, also made some random changes to the other options (turbo enabled, different buffer size, quantizers, rate control), hoping the freezing would be gone, but the problem persisted (I'm still on .NET 1.1).

As for the "freezing after 50 frames" It's what the MeGUI reports, but only because it's updated every 50 frames. When I open the "mencoder-2pass.log" after the freezing I can see it has actually freezed in the middle of frame 99 (in:98 - check below) and the file size is 8192 bytes, which is exactly 8k and this also seems suspicious (why not 7893 bytes for example?), so these almost 99 frames is exactly what fits in this 8k file. Then everything hangs up and MeGUI can't keep writing to the log file.

-----------------------------
avs2yuv "G:\t\06_.avs" - | mencoder - -ovc x264 -o NUL: -passlogfile "mencoder-2pass.log" -x264encopts pass=1:qp_constant=26:4x4mv:rc_buffer_size=700

mencoder-2pass.log:

in:0 out:0 type:I q:23.000 itex:200 ptex:0 mv:451 misc:221 imb:1215 pmb:0 smb:0;
in:1 out:1 type:P q:26.000 itex:0 ptex:0 mv:0 misc:104 imb:0 pmb:0 smb:1215;
in:2 out:2 type:P q:26.000 itex:0 ptex:0 mv:0 misc:104 imb:0 pmb:0 smb:1215;
.
.
in:96 out:96 type:P q:26.000 itex:10753 ptex:10201 mv:11648 misc:838 imb:296 pmb:461 smb:458;
in:97 out:97 type:P q:26.000 itex:7564 ptex:9988 mv:9560 misc:896 imb:171 pmb:506 smb:538;
in:98 out:98 type:P q:26.000 it

FREEZED and "it" is the last string written to the file (bytes 1FFE and 1FFF)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Now I press "abort" and close MeGUI and mencoder.exe "wakes up" and continues to write to "mencoder-2pass.log" in the background:

in:98 out:98 type:P q:26.000 itex:2684 ptex:7527 mv:7593 misc:1020 imb:137 pmb:492 smb:586;
in:99 out:99 type:P q:26.000 itex:870 ptex:7086 mv:5996 misc:1064 imb:61 pmb:484 smb:670;
in:100 out:100 type:P q:26.000 itex:736 ptex:8038 mv:5952 misc:1106 imb:64 pmb:504 smb:647;
.....etc.

Once again this problem is only present for trim(0,5000) or more. Shorter clips work like charm.

[Doom9]

actually, it's mencoder that writes to the logfile. However, mencoder writes out something to stdout for every frame you encode. So, I figure once it writes out the info from frame 100, my app reads it but then screws up somewhere and the reading threads lock. As stdout is no longer being read, mecoder is effectively halted.

[sherpya]

you may need to set null buffer to stdout/stderr descriptors

[JoeBG]

@ doom9

any enlightenments or progress

[Doom9]

any enlightenments or progress

Yes there is. I wanted to go to bed but I just had to have a look. First of all thanks to all those who made tests.

I can confirm there is a problem and I know why it only happens with sources longer than 5000 frames: as you might have noticed, I update the GUI every 50 frames. If a source is less or equal to 5000 frames, 50 frames means 1% of the video is encoded. If it's longer, percentage done = 0, and as I use that value to calculate the remaining time and that calculation contains a division by the percentage done, with a clip longer than 5000 frames I get a division by zero. As it's not catched, the program blocks. The batchfile is still running, but since the app is not reading from it, it makes no progress. And for some wicked reason, as the program exits and the pipes are no longer being read, the encoding once again takes off. I guess it would be interesting to figure out why that happens, but that's probably something for somebody who understands a lot more of the underlying Windows basics.

Anyway, bug identified, understood and fixed. Attached is the fixed MeGUI 0.161.

Changelog: fixed a division by zero exception that would prevent MeGUI from completing jobs longer than 5000 frames.

Come to think of it, I need to revise my progress estimator big time.. using an int value for the progress in percent is definitely not accurate enough.

Downloaded 79 times before removal.

[JoeBG]

Works

[Sergejack]

Is there a place with all the up-to-date files needed ?
I want to encode in X264 using AVS scripts with a GUI if possible, and there are too much attachement here and there for me.

[North2Polaris]

Originally posted by Sergejack
Is there a place with all the up-to-date files needed?

Check the readme.txt file in the MeGUI 0.161 zip file.

[Sergejack]

Originally posted by North2Polaris
Check the readme.txt file in the MeGUI 0.161 zip file.

I had done that, but it didn't work for me.
(I have an Athlon XP)

[North2Polaris]

Originally posted by Sergejack
I had done that, but it didn't work for me.
(I have an Athlon XP)

I have an Athlon XP, as well. I just copied the latest version of avs2yuv.exe (http://students.washington.edu/loren...synth/avs2yuv/) and mencoder (http://celticdruid.no-ip.com/xvid/mplayer/) to the same directory as the GUI.

Hmm...

[Sergejack]

Originally posted by North2Polaris
I have an Athlon XP, as well. I just copied the latest version of avs2yuv.exe (http://students.washington.edu/loren...synth/avs2yuv/) and mencoder (http://celticdruid.no-ip.com/xvid/mplayer/) to the same directory as the GUI.

Hmm...

As said in the txt file, but I have an runtime error.

[North2Polaris]

Originally posted by Sergejack
As said in the txt file, but I have an runtime error.

Did you check for avisynth.dll and devil.dll as required by Avs2YUV?

Other mencoder builds can also be found here:

http://oss.netfarm.it/mplayer-win32.php

[Ariakis]

I'm not sure if anyone else has had this problem, but when I aborted an encode, mencoder terminated, but avs2yuv remained running in the background... It's no big deal, just something to investigate.

I'm running WinXP Pro SP2 on an Athlon64 if it matters.

[Doom9]

As said in the txt file, but I have an runtime error.

That's just no bugreport I'm afraid. The next readme will contain required info for any support call or it won't be answered. Please, how can anybody know what your mysterious runtime error is without you actually posting the exact error message to begin with?

I'm not sure if anyone else has had this problem, but when I aborted an encode, mencoder terminated, but avs2yuv remained running in the background... It's no big deal, just something to investigate.

I'll check. It might not even be my error, but then again, perhaps I don't close all the pipes properly and so avs2yuv doesn't exit because data is still being read from it. Though eventually I'll move away from avs2yuv anyway.