x264 silently finish with no output - too long command line?

[ImmortAlex]

Recently I have a little hardware upgrade which leads me to reinstall my WinXP. After return all things back I found that my converting script doesn't work. x264 silently finish, producing empty mkv's.
After some investigations I found that when I shorten command line of x264 call, it works fine. It doesn't depend on particular options, just on total options length.

Tested with build from x264.nl, and with imk's one.

I remember that this kind of bug was mentioned in some old topic in this forum, but can't find it.

Can someone remember me what should I do?

[rack04]

What is your command line?

[J_Darnley]

Start using the short aliases for the options and/or use shorter path and file names.

[Sagekilla]

Yes, I had a similar issue where too long of a command line resulted in crashes for x264. Shortening the command line fixed the issue for me as well. The oddity is that my desktop only experiences this (Runs Vista Home Premium) yet my laptop (Also Vista Home Premium) doesn't.

[ImmortAlex]

Start using the short aliases for the options and/or use shorter path and file names.
Yeah, and throw out useless ones, like --weightb --b-pyramid :) The only solution I currently know...

P.S.: I own Windows XP SP3.

[qyot27]

If you explicitly declare the location of x264.exe and it works flawlessly with the long command line, then it's an ffdshow issue. Builds of ffdshow from between mid-November 2008 and like, mid-January of this year suffer from an issue that will cause it to fail to serve video to any encoder if the command options exceed something like 250 characters.

This applies to both AVISource (which would use the VFW decoder) and DirectShowSource (the regular video decoder). Alternately, if you use FFmpegSource in the script, the issue would disappear due to ffdshow not being used at all.

The possible solutions are A) get a newer build of ffdshow, B) make sure to always declare exactly where x264.exe (or whatever encoder you're using, as it doesn't matter) is, or C) prune your command line to be less than the specific number of characters. Arguably the easiest, or at least most convenient, of those options is A. Well, aside from the aforementioned "use FFmpegSource instead" thing.

[ImmortAlex]

Great! Thanx! I'll test it tomorrow. And, yes: older version of ffdshow was installed in my previous working system. I use beta 6 currently, dated 2008.12.19. Time to setup something labeled as "nightly build" :)

[ImmortAlex]

Yes. It works. Once again, thanx!