Some questions on MPEG-4 AVC, AAC and AviSynth

[e-Pawel]

Hy,

here I have a few questions on AVC encoding:

1. Surprisingly I can open my .mp4 files containing AVC data with Windows Media Player 10 but I think it has to do with the fact that I've Nero Premium and it obviously has installed suitable filters/decoders on its own. So why is WMP10 the only application that can handle h.264 files? I've tried to open H.264 files with other applications (RealPlayer, DivX Player, AllPlayer) but none has managed it. Why?

2/3. Why can't neither VirtualDubMod nor AviSynth (using DirectShowSource) open the .mp4 file either? I have heard that Nero causes that :confused: But how to solve that problem?

4. Is there a free AAC (but not the Nero's one) AAC+ encoder that you can use to encode the audio stream for .mp4 files?

5. Is it possible to put an MP3 or Ogg Vorbis stream into a .mp4 container?

6. Is there an application like VirtualDub that handles x264 and creates .mp4 containers?

Thanks in advance for your replies :)
Pawel

[nfm]

1. RealPlayer, DivX Player, AllPlayer are not directshow based players (I think), meaning they cannot use nero's filters. Use VideoLan or MPlayer.
2. You should be able to open .mp4 file with use of avisynth script:
DirectShowSource("C:\file.mp4")
With ffdshow you are supposedly be able to handle mp4 files, but as far as I know there's a bug. It also depends what is inside of mp4, keep in mind that it is only a container that holds audio and vieo stream, e.g aac and h264.
3. See ^
4. Yes there are, aacplus and faad, they accept .wav and encode them into aac (in mp4 container if specified)
5. Take 30 min of reading, it's worth it: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=62723
6. You may checkout AviDemux, I use mp4box with Yamb on Windows.

[e-Pawel]

Thanks nfm / Wielkie dzieki ;)

There's one more question I have:

7. Does it make sense to run more than 2 encoding passes when encoding with x264?

[DarkZell666]

I'll add some precisions on the answers given by nfm:

1) Videolan and mplayer aren't directshow based players either, but they do handle h.264 nicely :) The only viable and free directshow alternative is ffdshow.

2) having ffdshow to decode the h.264 video stream is one thing, but you'll also need an MP4 splitter, such as Haali's Matroska Splitter, which supports MP4 container as well as MPEG2-TS and MKV. Nero doesn't have any specific problem, except that it limits the usage of it's filters to certain applications (Nero ShowTime at least, but barely anything else, maybe WMP, I'm not even sure). So Nero's filters aren't useable for your purpose anyway.

4) It's FAAC, not FAAD. FAAD is the decoder (FAAD2 being the later version of FAAD), which decodes HE, PS and LC AAC. FAAC doesn't encode HE nor PS-AAC, but it does encode LC-AAC if that's what you want. If you want to encode to AAC+ (a.k.a HE-AAC and PS-AAC,or even aacPlusV2), you'll need a specific dll, along with the CLI wrapper for it.(here (http://kurtnoise.free.fr/index.php?dir=mp4tools/&file=FloatFR_aacPlusenc.zip)) It's the only other AAC+ encoding alternative to Nero AFAIK. Have a look at BeLight if you want a GUI for encoding to AAC+ (and many other formats btw).

6) Virtualdub will be able to handle h.264 if you have ffdshow installed and the VFW helper is configured properly. Anyway, virtualdub only supports AVI container, so for MP4, Avidemux is indeed the only alternative (though not too stable atm imho).

However, x264 is capable of creating an MP4 directly ! You simply need to name the output file "something.mp4" and tadaa ;) You can't mux any audio with it though, Yamb is indeed the way to go for that.

7) 2 passes in x264 are enough, the 3rd pass is only really useful if the target filsize isn't reached after the 2nd pass (though I would argue that a 3rd pass has a nice effect on very-low bitrate stuff ;))

[e-Pawel]

Thanks a lot for your replies :)

6) Hmm... Is there an application that combines Leiming's x264 GUI and AviDemux, an application that:
- can handle .avs files
- uses x264.exe directly (so it's easy to update the encoder without installing the whole application)
- uses external audio encoders (e.g. AAC or Lame MP3)
- creates .mkv and .avi containers too
- is as simple and plain as possible

Bye for now, Pawel

[DarkZell666]

MeGUI is capable of all you asked for, except the easy useability. It's kind of ... complicated to use when you look at it the very first time (though you might get used to it if you really need it ;)).

[foxyshadis]

For AAC+, there's also the 3gpp "reference" encoder, and enc_aacplus in winamp, which a number of encoders can wrap.

[e-Pawel]

@DarkZell666:

2) I have just installed ffdshow and now it works very fine! I didn't need to install any splitters :)

[HeadBangeR77]

Almost everything that should have been said has been already said, but just my two cents. ;)

AllPlayer, if you get used to it, is actually a DirectShow based player, and I had it working with NeroDigital decoder long before I installed ffdshow (which I would also recommend for H.264 decoding at least). The player cooperates with Haali's Matroska/MP4 splitter nicely, and handles almost everything MPC can handle. If the guy concentrated more on it's multi-platform and custom settings developement, instead of adding a stupid speech-synthetizer or similar things, this would be a player of my choice. ;)

pozdrówka /HDBR77