Transcode unbox to xvid

[nopper]

Despite months of effort, I've been unable to find a good way of transcoding unbox videos (wmv vc1 advanced profile) to xvid so that I can play them on my set-top media players (mvix, inoi, ect).

After freed from drm, the unbox videos are in unindexed wmv vc-1 format (6000 peak/2500 average vbr).

I've tried dozens of transcoding methods to get these unbox files in xvid format. I've had good results only with media coder. Any other method has resulted is sync issues, or stuttery video.

After transcoding with media coder to get the files out of the wmv format, they play great on my PC but I must run them through avi-recomp or else my set-top media players will have problems with them.

The above process has been working fairly well, until recently - some large files have been trunctated during the avi recomp step, and only 75% of the file gets ouput - even though avi recomp reports full success.

I'm thinking that there has to be a better way. I'm hoping someone here will tell me what it is.

[Ranguvar]

VirtualDub with the WMV plugin?

Let ffdshow's VfW decoder do VC-1.

[JoeShrubbery]

Or virtualdub fed an avisynth script...

directshowsource("yourfile.wmv")

[sysKin]

After transcoding with media coder to get the files out of the wmv format, they play great on my PC but I must run them through avi-recomp or else my set-top media players will have problems with them.


So wait, transcoding went well but your set top box doesn't like the resulting video?

If so, then you probably exceeded bitrate limitations in your file. Make sure you're using profile/level that's not "unconstrained", and/or just limit bitrate until it works fine.

What's avi-recomp? Does it recompress xvid into xvid again? If so, definitely don't do that, make correct xvid in the first place.

[Ranguvar]

Yeah... it recompresses...
http://www.videopedia.pl/avirecomp/news.php

Anyhow, try please for a second remuxing your files already done by MediaCoder in VirtualDubMod. Direct stream copy, open the old AVI and save again. If that fixes it, you've also hit a lucrative problem I ran into... My Archos doesn't like any AVIs not muxed by xvid_encraw or VirtualDub programs.

[nopper]

VirtualDub with the WMV plugin?

Let ffdshow's VfW decoder do VC-1.

Yeah, I had tried that. But it results in "missing codec" appearing in the vdub window. Probably because of the funky unbox wmv codec variant. The codec is definitely installed on the system though.


Anyhow, try please for a second remuxing your files already done by MediaCoder in VirtualDubMod. Direct stream copy, open the old AVI and save again. If that fixes it, you've also hit a lucrative problem I ran into... My Archos doesn't like any AVIs not muxed by xvid_encraw or VirtualDub programs.

Hmm... Looks like that might work. I noticed that when I opened the media-coder generated AVI in vdub, vdub reported that the audio was VBR compressed (and was not within AVI spec) even though I'm sure that media-coder was set to CBR.

So, I opted to direct stream copy the video, and full process the audio (as suggested by vdub). However, for MP3 audio encoding, there is no 192k setting in vdub. Am I missing something, can vdub encode mp3 audio at 192k 44800?

I will try just doing a direct stream copy of both the video and audio in vdub, maybe it will fix the erroneous VBR setting when it remuxes?