MeGUI: General Questions and Troubleshooting Thread [Archive] - Page 105

Zathor

16th January 2010, 12:35

Yes, audio is ok. The log is posted in page 259, and yes command line shows progress, eta, kbps, everything.

Now I dont know if the problem is x264, or MeGui which isn't capable of translating the (last build) x264 statistics.
Because you are the only one (at least that I know) I assume that your client / software is the problem. One thing that I have noticed is that you are using Windows XP SP2. Please update to SP3 - I do not believe that this is the problem, but the support for SP2 from Microsoft will end soon (ok, 13th of July...) and there wont be security updates for SP2 anymore. Regarding the problem you could try to use other builds of x264 like the unpatched builds from x264.nl or other patched builds like from here http://komisar.gin.by/.

Dogway

16th January 2010, 12:49

Thanks for the feedback I will try to fiddle with it. About OS, I think that everything above SP2 is overdo, if I update I would to linux, but once where software pushes me to abandon XP.

msaadn

16th January 2010, 21:44

Updated to MeGUI 0.3.2.0
Win Vista Ultimate SP2

When I load an avisynth script MeGUI freezes then responds after a long time with an error.

Avisynth Script error:
DirectShowSource : Timeout waiting for graph to start.
(C:\video.avs, line1)

Taddeusz

17th January 2010, 01:58

I seem to be having a problem with the anamorphic encoding. The calculations seem to be slightly off. Not by a whole lot but by enough to be noticeable. I'm comparing MeGUI to Handbrake. MeGUI definitely gives me the better quality video but Handbrake calculates the cropped anamorphic AR properly.

I have a 16:9 DVD video that I'm cropping to 720x368. The proper display width should be 853 but MeGUI is calculating it as 875. So the video appears a bit shorter than it really should be. I can correct this by using mp4box, but I shouldn't have to.

Any way we can get this fixed? Thank you.

Inspector.Gadget

17th January 2010, 02:01

That's not actually incorrect, MeGUI has just picked sides in the ITU debate...

Taddeusz

17th January 2010, 02:02

That's not actually incorrect, MeGUI has just picked sides in the ITU debate...

Regardless, the output looks wrong in any player compared to the same video encoded using Handbrake, or compared to the original for that matter.

Edit: Ok, I see what's going on now and am now using a true 16:9 input AR. How can there be a debate about math? 16/9 equals 1.7777778 no matter how you calculate it. What new math is the ITU using to figure this stuff out?

Inspector.Gadget

17th January 2010, 02:43

Search is your friend, but basically NTSC 16:9 isn't actually perfect 16:9, and a lot of DVDs are encoded as a true 720w of content rather than a 704w + 16w padding, resulting in ambiguity,

stax76

17th January 2010, 02:50

@Taddeusz

MeGUI just defines ITU Input DAR's, that works for most common sources but gives wrong values for uncommon sources like 704x576. MeGUI allows you to enter a custom DAR and this get's persisted so it's no problem not using ITU. Regardless of what you want to use up-scaling is IMO a very bad idea.

Taddeusz

17th January 2010, 03:10

All DVD's I've ever seen, at least here in the United States, are encoded 720x480 regardless of whether they are 4:3 or 16:9. I've never seen one encoded at 704x.

stax76

17th January 2010, 03:16

You shouldn't have than any problems with MeGUI, just enter 1,777 and 1,333 as custom input DAR if you don't want to use the ITU DAR's.

Taddeusz

17th January 2010, 03:19

You shouldn't have than any problems with MeGUI, just enter 1,777 and 1,333 as custom input DAR if you don't want to use the ITU DAR's.

Yea, I finally figured that out.

Inspector.Gadget

17th January 2010, 03:53

All DVD's I've ever seen, at least here in the United States, are encoded 720x480 regardless of whether they are 4:3 or 16:9. I've never seen one encoded at 704x.

But you've likely seen plenty encoded at 704 of content and 16 of black bars, which is what I was referring to - this creates the ambiguity.

Taddeusz

17th January 2010, 04:05

But you've likely seen plenty encoded at 704 of content and 16 of black bars, which is what I was referring to - this creates the ambiguity.

Ah, so what you're saying is that the decoders automatically translate the 704 to 720 before it gets displayed? Kind of like how 1080p H.264 is actually 1088 lines but gets cropped upon playback?

Inspector.Gadget

17th January 2010, 04:49

Zathor

17th January 2010, 14:43

Taddeusz

17th January 2010, 16:16

No, I mean the actual movie is encoded at 720px width but only 704 of that is the film transfer: the other 16 pixels are padding. That's generally an easy case: crop 8 from each side, resize or retain to PAR to get about 853x480. The problem comes in when the actual content of the film takes up all 720px of width: it is unknown to the end user what process was used and whether the full 720px should occupy only ~853px, or whether with the "bonus" of an additional 16px the correct display dimensions allocate 853px of width to the innermost 704px and the rest may be displayed in addition. MeGUI simply opts to treat uncropped NTSC DVD content as allocating 704px of width to the "correct" 853w frame and any uncropped areas to outside that frame. There are better explanations in other threads.

Ok then, regardless, whether the video is blocked a certain way on the encode the video itself, whether it be NTSC or PAL (720x480 or 720x576), is still encoded at 16:9 or 4:3. I just don't know how you can calculate those to be any different than 1.777778 and 1.333333. Math is math.

After cropping is another story, but before cropping 16:9 is 16:9 and 4:3 is 4:3.

stax76

17th January 2010, 16:45

Difficult topic! Search google for Aspect Ratio ITU-R BT.601

sneaker_ger

17th January 2010, 18:39

Here's a simple table if you only want to know the factors:
http://www.abload.de/img/itudar1vo7.png
left column: "commonly known" DAR
right column: ITU defined DAR

Cyberpro60

17th January 2010, 20:20

Inspector.Gadget

17th January 2010, 21:12

Use an OS other than W2K.

Cyberpro60

18th January 2010, 04:37

Nice but not possible in this case Inspector Gadget. Windows 2000 happens to be my network server and we are not about to change it whilst it performs everything we require of it. This server has provided me with a useful "offline" rendering platform that doesn't restrict my work on my own pc.
Besides that, I should also point out that Megui was working just fine on this platform until the most recent update a few days ago!

quantum5uicid3

18th January 2010, 05:19

security updates are going to stop in about 6 months, so you should probably start preparing for migration

Cyberpro60

18th January 2010, 09:24

Microsoft have been saying that for some time now and yet they keep extending the deadline. Meanwhile .... Megui is still not working! Anybody have some practical suggestions for fixing this problem?

lucamark

18th January 2010, 09:40

i don't think you can fix your problem without migration to another os.. There are many function (api calls) that are available only in xp, vista, 7.. like IsWow64Process (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms684139%28VS.85%29.aspx).. (see Requirements..)

quantum5uicid3

18th January 2010, 10:48

there havent been any changes to windows 2000 extended support schedule, 2010 was always end of lifecycle. xp/2003 is significantly better and i'm sure you could find them dirt cheap.

Mizzle

18th January 2010, 15:24

Hi, I just converted my very first avi file to an mkv to test it out on Youtube.
Are there any recommended settings for the best quality or anything to get in HD there...?
(btw, atm I'm getting the 'An error occurred...' message for that video aswell)

Just bumping my question, hoping it'll be answered.:)
My video is playing on youtube but there isn't an HD option nor is it in great quality either...?

Pfc Joker

18th January 2010, 15:40

I'm running MeGUI 3.2.0 on Win 7 x64 and really like it. I've only had one small issue with avi muxing.
I have to either set MeGUI to run in WinXP SP3 compatibility mode, or set just avimux_gui to WinXP SP3 compatibility mode. Soon as I do either everything works like a charm.

Inspector.Gadget

18th January 2010, 16:30

AVIMux_GUI is known not to work by default on Vista and W7. At one point Kurtnoise rolled back the version by one revision to one that did; I've no idea as to whether it has since been updated again.

Abradoks

18th January 2010, 18:03

Zathor
Can you please make it possible again to change "update_cache" location? It's quite useful to keep updates separately.

trevmar

18th January 2010, 21:55

I downloaded the latest version of Megui from Sourceforge to install on a Windows 2000 platform. Every time I go to run the application I get a series of the same error messages .. unable to find an entry point named "IsWow64Process" in DLL kernel32.dll'.
.
I just got the same problem today, when I updated.
I have a decades worth of software locked to my hard drive and hardware signatures (etc) and really can't move from Win2K without spending an awful lot of time on the transition.

So I restored my old copy of MeGUI from last night's backup :)
.

Zathor

18th January 2010, 23:25

Megui fatal error. Version 0.3.2.0 [0.3.1.1-56]
I downloaded the latest version of Megui from Sourceforge to install on a Windows 2000 platform. Every time I go to run the application I get a series of the same error messages. The first one says 'Error: Could not load previous settings'. When I click 'OK' on that error message I get the following Fatal Error 'Megui encountered a fatal error and may not be able to proceed. Reason: unable to find an entry point named "IsWow64Process" in DLL kernel32.dll'. Does anybody know how to fix this error?
Sorry, did not notice before that XP SP2 is required for IsWow64Process. Will be hopefully fixed soon, but I have no Win2000 so you have to test it :rolleyes:
And to follow the oftopic discussion - anyone with Win 2000 in a productive environment should really concider an upgrade or a different OS. If MS is not extending the lifecycle you will surely have problems after the 13th of July.

Zathor

19th January 2010, 00:06

Switch to the development server or replace your megui.exe with this file:
http://megui.org/auto/megui-core_0_3_2_1_1.zip
Please report back if the problem has been fixed with this update.

trevmar

19th January 2010, 01:47

.
Yes, that replacement file worked well, Zathor. Thanks :)
.

Zephyr_Truesdale

19th January 2010, 04:08

Apparently someone else had a similar problem that I had when it couldn't find the ".avs" file. I was wondering if that problem has been fixed, sorry about my late response about the problem in an early post.

Cyberpro60

19th January 2010, 14:24

Thanks for the patch Zathor ... it did appear to work. I can now start MeGui without the previously reported error messages. I do have a new problem with DGIndex.exe though. When I try to run DGIndex I get the following message:

'The procedure entry point AttachConsole could not be located in the dynamic link library KERNEL.dll'.

Any thoughts on how to address this issue?

Zathor

19th January 2010, 17:15

When I try to run DGIndex I get the following message:
'The procedure entry point AttachConsole could not be located in the dynamic link library KERNEL.dll'.
Any thoughts on how to address this issue?
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1357662#post1357662

As a workaround you can use an older build od DGmpg

Zephyr_Truesdale

19th January 2010, 18:47

Is it possible to set what audio track for Nero AAC codec? Whenever I'm using VirtualDubMod 1.6.0.0 Surround to set what language each track are and I don't seem to see that option in MeGUI.

LigH

19th January 2010, 18:59

In the german doom9/Gleitz board, we got reports that with the latest MeGUI update the encoding speed went down to between 2/3 and 1/3 of the previous speed, between ~ 14th Jan and 16th Jan. Unfortunately, the users reporting this slowdown are not very experienced in reporting all technically interesting details... At least there are two distinct reports.

Of course, different settings are possible - but not very probable: There are users which don't experiment a lot, they chose a preset which works and prefer to keep it.

Are there any different defaults?

nurbs

19th January 2010, 19:21

I just looked through some of the profiles and they don't use excessively slow settings, although I don't have the old ones to compare to. Hard to tell what the issue without knowing exactly what profile they are using but there are some possibilities.
a) They still use profiles from the previous version of MeGUI which were made for x264 even before mb-tree and the preset and tuning system was in. The defaults changed since then which could explain the slowdowns. (I don't actually know if the old profiles still work with MeGUI and if the new profiles have the same name as the old ones. I think the names are different.)
b) While the new profiles don't use slow options some of them, like DXVA Insane, use low CRF values (17 in that case). Since the encoding time is proportional to the bitrate that can cause slowdowns.

Can you tell them to post the log of one of the encodes so we can take a look at the command line and speed. They should also encode their CPU speed. Alternatively a mediainfo from one of the old and one of the new encodes. (One of the old ones would be useful to know how their settings changed anyway.)

Zathor

19th January 2010, 19:29

The stable branch has been updated from x264 1183 to x264 1376. There have been a lot of new features (e.g. mbtree) which can cause a slowdown.

ZZZERO

20th January 2010, 04:30

After the latest MEGUI updates my encodes are ending up much smaller than expected although I haven't changed any settings in my profile. I compared my command lines from the logs both before and after the updates and they're quite different even though as I said I haven't changed anything in my profile.

Here's the command line as it is since the update:

C:\Program Files\megui\tools\x264\x264.exe" --profile high --crf 20 --thread-input --threads 4 --b-adapt 2 --ref 5 --subme 5 --trellis 0 --sar 1:1 --aud --output

Here's how it used to be:

"C:\Program Files\megui\tools\x264\x264.exe" --profile high --crf 20 --ref 5 --no-fast-pskip --b-adapt 2 --b-pyramid --subme 6 --trellis 0 --partitions p8x8,b8x8,i4x4,i8x8 --threads 4 --thread-input --sar 1:1 --aud --output

I really don't understand what's going on with this update and why I'm seeing such a dramatic change in my encodes. I did a 3 hour movie and it ended up about 500MB less than I would have expected and doesn't look as nice as my typical encode.

I'm using MEGUI 0.3.2.1 and x264 Jeeb's 1376 patched build v2

nurbs

20th January 2010, 08:41

Smaller size at the same crf is what happens with many sources since mb-tree was introduced half a year ago. The only thing that makes a difference for quality is subme 5 (6 activates psy-rd and 7 is the new default) and --no-fast-pskip (which shouldn't matter at all for quality since it's only activated in the placebo preset) One question do you still use an old preset or a new one that came with the updates?

ZZZERO

20th January 2010, 13:26

I use a custom profile based on one of the presets but don't use any of the presets. My file size reduction and quality loss has happened within the past week, not since six months ago. With the completely new x264 settings interface, it seems clear that MEGUI is not carrying over one's previous settings.

nurbs

20th January 2010, 13:42

If you didn't use development versions of MeGUI and you didn't replace x264 yourself then the version you have been using until last week was about 6 months old. A lot has changed since then and not all of the old settings apply anymore. You should look into the preset and tuning system and make a new profile. There is now the preset slider using presets implemented within x264 itself that lets control the speed/quality tradeoff and there are tunings for different content (film, animation, ect.) Lower the CRF value if you are not satisfied with the quality. Personally I think CRF 20 with the new defaults is fast and looks good for SD content.

If you want the same as your old version take the profile you have, turn mb-tree off, turn weighted p-prediction off and change all the other settings so they match your old profile. Turning this off will of course result in lower quality at any given bitrate. Heres a list of everything you used thats different from the defaults: --crf 20 --ref 5 --no-fast-pskip --b-adapt 2 --b-pyramid normal --subme 6 --trellis 0 --sar 1:1 --aud
Note that the b-pyramid option has changed and there are now two modes. You most likely want "normal".

Elbart_

21st January 2010, 13:44

Today, out of boredom, I encoded a tv-recording (DVB-T MPEG2 with ~3,5Mbit/s, 25fps) with both the "Iphone 2-pass" and the "Bluray 2-pass" x264-preset, and the Bluray-preset encoded almost twice as fast. Is that supposed to be the case or have I got some misconfiguration on my side?

MeGUI 0.3.3.0, Jeeb's x264 1376 v2, desired resolution 624x352

LigH

23rd January 2010, 04:12

Thank you for your guessing, nurbs; I just don't believe that MBTrees got introduces exactly between 14th and 16th Jan 2010, but a little earlier. One reported that he updated several times during the last week, but ony the last update made it slower.

But we have similar reports for StaxRip now too.

If it is true that especially x264 was not updated too regularly, then this may indeed be the reason. Quite surprising how much everything is related in a whole converting environment like MeGUI.

Unfortunately there are no useful replies so far. We will poke them again...

J-Wo

26th January 2010, 06:44

Just started to use this program to convert my DVD rips to H.264 MKV. If my audio source is 5.1 AC3, how can I tell MeGUI to do a direct stream copy of the AC3 without converting the audio?

blsbball

26th January 2010, 06:50

Does anyone notice any decrease in quality with the latest updated build and presets? It seems that even with the highest profiles quality seems to be lower than before. Im using the unrestricted DXVA profile and am seeing a definite lack in quality.

Inspector.Gadget

27th January 2010, 05:24

Just started to use this program to convert my DVD rips to H.264 MKV. If my audio source is 5.1 AC3, how can I tell MeGUI to do a direct stream copy of the AC3 without converting the audio?

Add the original AC3 to the MKV Muxer along with your newly encoded video.