Way to update older Xvid encodings to newer version?

[chilledinsanity]

Hey,

I did a lot of encodings back when Xvid was still in early development and for one batch of the codec I used Nic's binaries (around Oct/Nov 2003). The encoding worked great and played back fine, but since then the compatibility was broken in future releases. And by broken I mean that it leads to frequent bleeding pixels when the newer codec is installed, but still looks fine if I reinstall the old version of the codec. Is there a simple way of re-encoding the file to get rid of the bleeding pixels? They show up in virtualdub as well, unless I have the old codec installed.

So far, the only method I can think of is to reinstall the older codec, save the video files in HuffyUV or something similar, then install the newer codec and re-encode them. This however will be really intensive for me in terms of hard drive space and I was wondering if anyone had any other ideas. Thanks.

[celtic_druid]

Try adding a userdata tag of XviD0001. This as I recall helps with some work arounds for older bugs.

I would think though since back then it was xvid.dll vs. xvidvfw.dll (and a shared xvidcore.dll) that you could have both installed. Maybe give the xvidvfw.dll a different vidc entry that way the older build should be used to decode, but the newer build should be available for compression. Not sure about registry key clashes, but I guess as long as you never load the VfW config in the old one it shouldn't create any.

Another option would be old Xvid to decode and ffdshow to encode (via xvidcore.dll).

[chilledinsanity]

Cool, I'll look into that and see if I have any luck. Supporting both versions would be the best solution, and I think I actually have a decoder-only version of the old codec (though it will crash on newer encodes). Also, I know this is a stupid question, but where do I alter the userdata tag?

[celtic_druid]

Use MPEG4Modifier. You should only be changing it if there aren't any tags and now that I think about it in 2003 it would have been XviD0003 or higher. Build would need to be from 2002 to not add a userdata tag.

[chilledinsanity]

Finally got around to testing it, the userdata tag worked like magic, thanks!