StaxRip Feature Requests

[stax76]

This thread is dedicated for StaxRip feature request. The more effort you put into a request, the higher the chances the feature will be added.


Try the latest version to check if the feature has already been added
Explain as clear and detailed as possible
Explain usage scenarios if possible
If you have a good idea suggest how the feature could look like
If possible post resources that could help to implement the feature

[Ajax_Undone]

The ability to shut off the Help screens.... They are useful but I would love it if they were by choice option...

Either that or get rid of the help screens all together, and have a check box to enable/disable balloons for each and every feature on the page displayed...

[stax76]

Both can already be disabled in the settings. :)

[aliumalik]

is there any way to have a portable version? Right now avisynth needs to be installed to work. I was wondering if an extracted version can be made to work with stax rip

[stax76]

You mean to run on top of Mono? Since I use XP only and therefore don't have great knowledge about other platforms I don't consider to make StaxRip portable.

[aliumalik]

You mean to run on top of Mono? Since I use XP only and therefore don't have great knowledge about other platforms I don't consider to make StaxRip portable.

No I meant instead of installing AviSynth/XVID I could just extract their binaries and they could work from there. This way I would not have to install AviSynth and XVID on every PC I use StaxRip on

[stax76]

AviSynth and XviD need to register various things which does the installer, I'm afraid it's not possible to just move them.

[Sharc]

Would it be possible to include chapter extraction from movies such that chapters could be used for simple navigation during playback on the SAP?

[Poopoo]

Stax, are you thinking about abandoning Staxrip ?

First there was the great support forum on your site, then it
was replaced by another one, and now when people finally started to get comfortable with it, you removed that one too. It's pretty clear you have no more interest in helping people out.

I seriously feel the end of a once so great encoder-Gui.:(

[ajua]

I would like to see multi-output support (encode to various formats, one after another).
AC3 encoding features and more options to AAC audio bitrates would be great as well.

[Sharc]

Stax, are you thinking about abandoning Staxrip ?
....
I seriously feel the end of a once so great encoder-Gui.:(
That would be bad, indeed. But would he ask for new feature requests - starting this thread - if his plans were to abandon StaxRip? :p

[stax76]

Would it be possible to include chapter extraction

Are there command line applications doing this?

Stax, are you thinking about abandoning Staxrip?

I'm a bit bored by computers and movies in general but the change of the support forum don't has anything to do with that. It might have advantages to use doom9 as primary support forum.

I would like to see multi-output support (encode to various formats, one after another).

Please elaborate.

AC3 encoding features

Do you target Blue-ray?

more options to AAC audio bitrates would be great as well.

Current options are quality based so the bitrate can differ greatly.

[Sharc]

Are there command line applications doing this?
Don't know. I have found this only
http://www.videohelp.com/tools/ChapterXtractor

[jsquare]

Stax, could you bring back the Settings Directory to the default StaxRip folder?
I upgraded from 1.0.0.3 to 1.1.0.3 and I lost all my templates and settings, the old way seems easier for just replacing the executable when updates are available, and also makes it almost portable like aliumalik suggested.

[stax76]

On startup when StaxRip don't find a settings dir, IIRC it will show three options

User
Startup
Custom...

The startup option will only be shown when the startup dir is not a protected system dir like 'c:\Programs', settings should never be saved in protected system dirs.

In all of the three options when the dir is empty StaxRip creates new settings or if it contains old settings it loads the old settings.

To solve your problem move your startup dir out of your programs dir, move your settings dir into your startup dir, use the name 'Settings' for the settings dir, start StaxRip, select 'Startup'. Please let me know if you still think it needs improvement.

[Sharc]

The possibility to close StaxRip / Switch off the PC and resume the encoding later without entirely loosing the already encoded part would be nice.

[Brother John]

I doubt that’s possible without support in the encoder itself. But you can usually safely hibernate during encoding as far as no external hard drives are involved.

[Sharc]

For DVD backups I thought about taking advantage of the cell (chapter) structure, but maybe it's not so straightforward and not worth the pain. Thanks for the hint with hibernation.

[stax76]

Yes, standby which should take little power consumption should work reliable.

Regarding the DVD structure, some DVD's have a really nasty structure requiring to prepare the files with tools of the likes of PgcDemux, vStrip GUI, DVD Shrink etc. Other tools like AutoMKV and AutoGK automate such tools but my stand for this is similar like automatically detecting field processing (IVTC/deinterlace etc.), it's too difficult to detect it perfectly and often it's easier/faster/more precise to perform things manually. This leaves newbies out in the cold, StaxRip has a lot more things hard for newbies, it's not really suitable for complete newbies I'm afraid.

[Sharc]

Regarding the DVD structure, some DVD's have a really nasty structure requiring to prepare the files with tools of the likes of PgcDemux, vStrip GUI, DVD Shrink etc. .............This leaves newbies out in the cold, StaxRip has a lot more things hard for newbies, it's not really suitable for complete newbies I'm afraid.
Very true, but beating you with your own stick :D
With StaxRip you can *easily* convert your DVD's .....
But serious, StaxRip is a great, very flexible and powerful GUI which in fact makes mpeg4 encoding convenient and easy even for non-experts. :)
:thanks:

[stax76]

You are right of course, the description needs some improvement and dealing with the DVD structure could also be improved but it's really difficult.

[acidsex]

Any chance we can get AVCHD output or at the very least an AVCHD profile that accounts for the AVCHD container overhead? I have yet to this day been able to fit a DVD5 encode into an AVCHD disc. This would make it perfect for me.

[jwhyche]

Multi angle support would be nice when dealing with VOB with different angles in them. And is there any way to have staxrip tag mkv's that is makes? So it would be possible to go back and with media info tell what we used to encode the video with?

[naj]

I've searched and searched and couldn't get any info on this, so I ask...

Is there a way to encode a PSP-type movie (480x272) in PMP container and include subtitles in .srt format (instead of hard-coding them)? I see the PMP container as usable only for that instead of MP4, so I don't get it. I press the container properties button and there's nothing to change, no way to add subtitles. In the MKV container, though, I see the option to had soft-coded subtitles...

[RickA]

Greets Stax,

A nice, handy feature -I think- would be is a size indicator for the original source video we are converting. When doing the Compressibility Check it would be helpful in comparing the original size to how much we may be shrinking the video to. Of course, it is no big deal to open Explorer and target the files or VOB's to get the source size. When adding a bunch of movies or episodes to the jobs list it is easy to forget the original source size of the current VOB's I'm working with. Yes, I could attempt to use actual brain power and remember what the current source size is. :-)

Thank you much for an awesome product.

Cheers,
Rick

[-TiLT-]

1. Parallel audio encoding

# Explain as clear and detailed as possible

Wouldn't it be nice to take full advantage of your multi-core achitecture and run two besweet sessions simultaniously when dealing with two audio sources? When encoding to mp3, only one core is doing the job. Would speed things up a little bit.

# Explain usage scenarios if possible

Multiple audio sources


2. Framerate conversion

# Explain as clear and detailed as possible

When doing PAL speedups or similar changes of the framerate, I reload the avs created by staxrip, after applying .assumefps() to the source-line and removing all other filters.

# Explain usage scenarios if possible

I am combining video and audio from different sources like TV-broadcasts and DVDs. Usually my DVD-Source has the original 23.976fps, but the TV-broadcast comes with 25fps.
While dubbing the audio, I use an avs with .assumefps(25) in Audition and several audio sources resulting in an audio-file matching the source only when the source is upspeeded.

# If you have a good idea suggest how the feature could look like

Right-Click on source
- choice of avisynths possible ways to change the framerate that would affect final bitrate and modifying the values in a popup window.


Thank you.

[Purre]

It would be nice if it is possibly to import flv-files so I can export them to xvid format :)

[bash]

First of all let me spread some love for staxrip.
This application is useful stax :-)

Now for the request if anyone is with me i would love to see the ability/option to encode the audio stream only in a movie and remuxing the video part of the file with the newly endcoded audio stream.

Here is the scenario i have a couple of hundred file with AC3 which i hate because of the volume level jumping all over the place and just irritating me by turning the volume up and down continously during the watching of a movie plus that's at least an extra 250 MB that i just don't need and is eating precious movie space.
So it would be nice to have the ability/option to add only audio encoding jobs to job list and even better remuxing the new audio and video to a new file (maybe sending a command line to AVIMux).
Now that would be groovy
Thank you for reading.
Peace out

[R.A.F.]

Suggestions for improvement:

a) The user should be able to switch-off the "The job was sent to the currently processing StaxRip instance"-function, because when encoding to Xvid using a quad-core-CPU it is necessary to run 2 (or even more) instances to fully use the capability of the CPU. I think you don't know, but Xvid v1.1.3 (Koepi's build) is only able to utilize 2 cores with one instance. So you need to run 2 (or even better 3) instances of StaxRip simultaneously for encoding Xvid-files, so that all 4 cores are used to 100 %. With elder StaxRip-builds this was still possible. But with the latest one (from 1.1.0.0 on I think) no more. Other compiles of the Xvid-Codec (like from "The druid"), which support quad-core don't help much, 'cause these versions never manage to utilize 100 % of the capacity of quadcore-CPU's (mostly only 70 - 80 %).

b) Ripping the AC3-track from the DVD at first of all always takes several minutes and it's not needed, that the user waits for it. It would be enough when the AC3-track would be ripped later, when starting the main-transcoding-process (the "job").

c) BeSweet has still included an outdated lame.dll (somehow the v3.97 Beta 1 from October 2005). So the version on your server needs an update to lame.dll v3.98 final (can be downloaded e.g. from www.rarewares.org). Thx!

P.S.:
I've donated some money for this great project. Hope this helps to increase motivation for further development of StaxRip. - Anyway.... keep on the good work!

[3eye]

hi.
the best version for me was 1.0.0.2.
i update to 1.1.1.0 version, but i wanted to reinstall 1.0.0.2.

i uninstall the latest one, and reinstall the 1.0.0.2, but since then its not working and its crashing every time i start the program. .

thank you for your help

[R.A.F.]

@3eye: Probably you have to manually delete the folder "c:\documents and settings\administrator\application data\StaxRip", where the settings for the new StaxRip-Version are located. Because the old executable is not able to make use of some of the settings for the new version and crashes.

[avdw]

Hi,

Please DO NOT post any more feature requests, Staxrip has (just like 99% of its competitors) been abandoned.

[stax76]

It's on the low but I'll likely work on some requests soon so please be patient.

[R.A.F.]

Hi,
Please DO NOT post any more feature requests, Staxrip has (just like 99% of its competitors) been abandoned.

Against this votes that there are still released devlopment-builds like the last one from 19-08/2008. That was yet yesterday!!!

[R.A.F.]

Suggestions for improvement:

a) The user should be able to switch-off the "The job was sent to the currently processing StaxRip instance"-function, because when encoding to Xvid using a quad-core-CPU it is necessary to run 2 (or even more) instances to fully use the capability of the CPU. I think you don't know, but Xvid v1.1.3 (Koepi's build) is only able to utilize 2 cores with one instance. So you need to run 2 (or even better 3) instances of StaxRip simultaneously for encoding Xvid-files, so that all 4 cores are used to 100 %. With elder StaxRip-builds this was still possible. But with the latest one (from 1.1.0.0 on I think) no more. Other compiles of the Xvid-Codec (like from "The druid"), which support quad-core don't help much, 'cause these versions never manage to utilize 100 % of the capacity of quadcore-CPU's (mostly only 70 - 80 %).

If I give some particularly thought, I'd suggest the easiest way would be when StaxRip would allow to run more jobs simultaneously (2 or as much as the user sets in the settings) to encode. This would make it redundant to start more than one session of StaxRip to encode different movies at the same time.

[stax76]

The user should be able to switch-off the "The job was sent to the currently processing StaxRip instance"-function

I've uploaded a beta asking which instance to handle the job.

b) Ripping the AC3-track from the DVD at first of all always takes several minutes and it's not needed, that the user waits for it. It would be enough when the AC3-track would be ripped later, when starting the main-transcoding-process (the "job").

How much faster is the indexing without demuxing?

BeSweet has still included an outdated lame.dll (somehow the v3.97 Beta 1 from October 2005). So the version on your server needs an update to lame.dll v3.98 final (can be downloaded e.g. from www.rarewares.org). Thx!

Did you try if it a new version works with BeSweet?

If I give some particularly thought, I'd suggest the easiest way would be when StaxRip would allow to run more jobs simultaneously (2 or as much as the user sets in the settings) to encode. This would make it redundant to start more than one session of StaxRip to encode different movies at the same time.

Running jobs simultaniously while still being able preparing jobs would certainly be the most flexible solution. Problem is when I wrote this 8 years ago as newbie I didn't realize the processing code should be decoupled from the GUI code, I'm not sure how hard it would be to fix this now, threading is rather difficult.

[R.A.F.]

Did you try if it a new version works with BeSweet?

Quick reply: Yes, of course the actual versions of LAME work without any flaws with the old BeSweet-exe. I've already encoded about 50 movies with the actual lame_enc.dll v3.98 and the v3.97 final. Ok, I must admit I only sticked with the setting "CBR 128" (as in my eyes I don't need a supa-dupa sound having only a mediocre picture-quality of a movie when using Xvid).
I'll do a quick test later on with the VBR-settings of LAME v3.98 (-V0 ~ -V5). But as these quality-wise syntax was already introduced from v3.97 on (also the first beta) I'm 99.9 % sure it will also work. If it shouldn't work correctly, I will tell.


How much faster is the indexing without demuxing?

To be honest, I don't understand your question. DG-Index "demuxes audio and indexes MPEG-2" by default. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the user can't do any selection (deselect demuxing), no?
Demuxing and indexing needs for 90-Minute-Movies between 1:30 Mins. and 3:45 Mins.. I don't know where the time-difference comes from, because the 2 movies I tried out had nearly the same length (81:45 Mins. and 88:30 Mins.).


I've uploaded a beta asking which instance to handle the job.

Thx! - This already helps a little.


Problem is when I wrote this 8 years ago as newbie...

Wow! - I really didn't know that StaxRip is indeed such an "old" project!
I'm into movie-transcoding and using StaxRip now for only 6 months! :)

[Sharc]

Hi,

Please DO NOT post any more feature requests, Staxrip has (just like 99% of its competitors) been abandoned.
:confused: .... motivated by overwhelming feature request or overwhelming donations ? :p

[PatchWorKs]

Dunno if you already evaluated it, but switching to MediaCoder (http://mediacoder.sourceforge.net/) as a backend engine would be great (and should be simple due to its Extensions support (http://mediacoder.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Creating_extensions_for_MediaCoder))

You can drop the .NET need, skip the codecs/tools update every time and earn mutch more a/v formats support.

Hope that helps (or at least inspires).

[Adub]

^^ That is a terrible idea. MediaCoder is a broken piece of software, with numerous bugs, and is convoluted beyond reason.

[ceeriael]

Hey,

it would be so nice if staxrip could support convertion of DTS sound.

Right now i am opening the file in staxrip to get the dts file, and then using foobar2000 to convert the dts file into something staxrip can handle. It would be so nice if it would be made so that staxrip can handle DTS file.

//Ceeriael

[stax76]

Since recently there where quite a few requests regarding dts and aac as audio source, I decided to work on a solution using AviSynth and piping as alternative audio processing method.

[ceeriael]

niiiiice =)

thx you so mutch.... love this pice of software. Have just started using it 3 weeks ago. Cant even imagine life before =)


//Ceeriael

[MoUCLAs]

hallo stax..

i am using staxrip for long time. it is a great program which is continusly developing.
I came up with the idea to implement in staxrip a choise to run only the 2nd pass of an encode. It could be usefull when the program crashes, or when i am trying to improve the quality of the encode, changing only the bitrate, or some x264.exe parameters. It is not need to run again the first pass.
thank you once more for your great job..

[Poromenos]

Hello,
I just got StaxRip and find it great for my needs, I only have one feature request: Would it be possible to specify a "temporary files" directory, for anything that is not input or output file? Right now StaxRip puts its temp files (avs scripts, demuxed audio, etc) in the directory of the input file and fills my directories with junk. Could I set where these should go?

[stax76]

@MoUCLAs

IIRC it was years this was requested the last time, I don't have enough time to add features requestes that rarely. I believe however that it can be emulated easily, load the encoded project, go into the codec dialog, copy (ctrl+c) the first three parameters including arguments, e.g.:

--pass 2 --bitrate 49283 --stats "G:\Samples\Pulp Fiction\VTS_01_1 temp files\Pulp Fiction.stats"

Now change the mode to bitrate, the cmdl will be the same except there is no --pass and --stats switch, just paste these switches in the command line tab under 'Add to all'.

Using a comp. check you can rawly predict the quality. The point of two pass is to use a fixed filesize, please consider to use quality mode. Did you often experience x264 crashes?

Would it be possible to specify a "temporary files" directory

This was one of the most frequents reuqests for years, because of that I've finally added this feature, just use the beta.

[Poromenos]

This was one of the most frequents reuqests for years, because of that I've finally added this feature, just use the beta.

Ah, thank you. Now it's perfect. Would it be possible to have it remove the temp dir when done, by the way? This would be especially useful so you don't run out of space for batch encodings, plus I don't think anyone really needs the files after the encode...

[ultratoto14]

Stax, have you tried the DGAVCIndexNV with hardware decoding of H264. Every time i try it with staxRip, staxrip crashes.

Edit : tried latest beta, no go ...

[alaxa]

I am trying to rip some DVDs with TV series inside. Because many episodes are coded inside each VOB, I had to select part of the VOB (with DGindex) and save/demux to a project file. This gave me the d2v files and AC3 files for each episode.
So I have this situation:
ep1.d2v
"ep1 T01 3_2ch 448Kbps DELAY 0ms.ac3"
"ep1 T04 2_0ch 448Kbps DELAY 0ms.ac3"
the same for ep2

because I already tried to compress this d2v and its AC3 files, I already have the mp3s.
"ep1 T01 3_2ch 448Kbps DELAY 0ms.mp3"
"ep1 T04 2_0ch 448Kbps DELAY 0ms.mp3"

so I think it would be nice if Staxrip could do a rexgep or instring match inside the "Stream Name" of the AudioMux's profile editor. This would let me to choose the primary AudioFile which now is always English
I know that this feature is already there and it's based on the "Language" of the AudioMux's profile editor,but works only if Staxrip is ripping the DVD or the DVD has been ripped with "standard" procedure, not saving each part of the VOBs

Thanks,
a.

[stax76]

Would it be possible to have it remove the temp dir when done, by the way?

There is now a option in the beta version under Options/Advanced/Misc.

Stax, have you tried the DGAVCIndexNV with hardware decoding of H264. Every time i try it with staxRip, staxrip crashes.

The nvidia cards I've tried had a terrible analog TV out so I had to buy ATI. It's however possible to modify the command line in the options under Preperation so even if the command line is different (I don't know if it is) you should be able to get it working.

I am trying to rip some DVDs with TV series inside. Because many episodes are coded inside each VOB, I had to select part of the VOB.

StaxRip should be able to handle DVD TV series well, it renames your audio file writing the language to the filename which is much better then anything else. It should be possible to rip each episode to a single file and then use file batch mode or rip each episode to a directory and then use directory batch mode. Please read here (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1178301#post1178301)to learn how to find postings about what lools like DVD Decrypter, DVD Shrink, vstrip GUI, PGC Demux etc. can do for you.