gk and x.264 questions

[saint-francis]

Ok. I'm a complete video encoding newb. I have been using auto gk for several years with reasonable success but I have just for the first time tried using gk, and with x.264, and it didn't work. At all. I got an .avi but it wouldn't play at all. It made mpc crash immediately every time I tried to play it. I thought I followed the guide to the letter but I guess something was very wrong. The one thing I know I did drop the ball on was not setting the codec to 2 threads, but that's not a disaster. It took about 2 hours to run both passes. Now I have heard tell of x.264 taking 20 hours to encode 100 minutes, with the processor NAILED. I have enclosed screen shots of how I had gk set up. Any help would be much appreciated.

http://img237.imageshack.us/img237/6466/gkscreenshot1gx0.png

http://img237.imageshack.us/img237/1356/gkscreenshot2fc6.png

http://img237.imageshack.us/img237/4004/gkscreenshot4du0.png

[check]

I'd recommend you move away from GK to a more modern solution. Personally, I use & recommend MeGUI, but there are a whole bunch of viable alternatives in the MPEG4 Encoder GUIs forum.

Anyway, chances are with your problem that you have some sort of decoder incompatibility, or the x264 vfw version you have is borked. The fact GK can only use x264's vfw interface (which is a now bolted on addition, and, in my opinion a Great Big Dirty Hack(tm)) is a serious hinderance in terms of playback compatibility and standards compliance.

[saint-francis]

Yeah megui looks great. But. it seems to be a little more difficult to use and there isn't a comprehensive guide for it like there is with gk. I know about the wiki but I am still learning the basics. If people here think that I could handle it then I'll give it my best but I want to take it one step at a time. Frankly I feel a bit overwhelmed as it is; which I'm sure you can tell. Megui does a better job of analyzing the source, no? Shame I just installed gk on a fresh windows install and now I might need to dump it leaving a whole mess in the registry. But any way isn't it weird that it took so little time to encode? I tried it again and it took only 10 minutes. So I'm obviously doing something very very wrong.

[check]

In terms of encoding time, it's very probable something is breaking, but I haven't used GK for so long I can't help you troubleshoot it.
Anyway, I personally find MeGUI has a far clearer interface :^). MeGUI doesn't leave any registry traces on your system, so there's no risk to installing it. I'd suggest you try it out for a week or so and see how you like it. The other advantage is that it's currently a tool with an active userbase, and is currently udner development, unlike GK.
You also correctly identified the most visible improvement from GK to MeGUI - the avs creator is far superior, as it can detect the interlace type and it uses more modern filters.

[saint-francis]

Alright. I'm going to give it a go. I suppose that if nothing else there will be more information on the forum about it.

Thanks for your advice.