newb: avimerge help -- merge loses video

[synaptical]

hey there - my first post to these forums. :D i have learned a lot by lurking and reading here, but now i'm stuck.

the problem is i have some backups that rip and enconde to multiple chapters, but when i use avimerge on the finished products, the video drops out on playback when it gets to the second chapter. the sound continues, but no video, only a black screen. there's also an annoying audio "blip" right as the chapter changes. i can't figure out what i'm doing wrong, can anyone assist?

(and btw, is there any shortcut for merging multiple chapters without having to enter each filename in the -i option? :rolleyes: )

thanks. :cool:

[synaptical]

all the responses, i'm underwhelmed. :rolleyes:

well what about audio sync issues? does anyone know anything about that?

[albertgasset]

The '-i' option doesn't chain the video files, it muxes them (e.g.: multiple audio tracks for different languages). You need a video editor to concatenate the video files like avidemux or mencoder. Are you encoding the chapters separated for any particular reason? If not, I think it's better to do it at once (faster, better compression).

[synaptical]

Originally posted by albertgasset
The '-i' option doesn't chain the video files, it muxes them (e.g.: multiple audio tracks for different languages). You need a video editor to concatenate the video files like avidemux or mencoder. Are you encoding the chapters separated for any particular reason? If not, I think it's better to do it at once (faster, better compression).

thanks. the help and man page, though, says the -i option is to specify what files to merge. am i misunderstanding something? :confused:

one of the 17 chapters apparently contained no real data, and i got an error when i was ripping the title that said to discard the chapter (using dvd::rip). when i select the other 16, it rips them to separate directories that i couldn't find a way to encode except one by one.

NAME
avimerge - merge several AVI-files into one

SYNOPSIS
avimerge -o name -i file ... [ -p file ] [ -a num ] [ -A num ] [ -b
num ] [ -f commentfile ] [ -x indexfile ]

DESCRIPTION
avimerge merges several AVI-files into one. Can also be used to fix an
index of a broken file and can also replace audio tracks or muxes new
ones. It can read raw AC3 and MP3 files for multplexing.

OPTIONS
-o name
Specify the name of the output file.

-i file
Specify the name(s) of the input file(s) to merge into the output file.

[albertgasset]

Originally posted by synaptical
[B]thanks. the help and man page, though, says the -i option is to specify what files to merge. am i misunderstanding something?


No, sorry, I was worng (I was confusing '-i' with '-p'). You're concatenating compressed files, right? This is often problematic with some codecs. You could try this with mencoder:
cat 1.avi 2.avi 3.avi | mecoder -o out.avi -noidx -oac copy -ovc copy -

Or rip all chapters of a title at once with dvd::rip, setting the "Specify chapter mode" to "No".

[synaptical]

thanks, i will try that.

this sync issue is the worst, though. it happens with both transcode with dvd::rip and mencoder with acidrip. i cannot figure out what on earth i am doing wrong. i've done single pass, two pass, zoom to full frame deinterlacing, no deinterlacing, xvid, xvid4, ffmpeg, changed the bit rate (automatically only, through the target size), re-ripped, etc. nothing works.

1 backup seemingly at random will be okay, and that sometimes won't be viewable on windows without a weird effect like massive frame drops or something. some will be out of sync the whole movie, others will go increasingly out of sync as the movie goes on until at the end there will be a really massive delay -- seconds. i have followed all the guides i could find to a tee, but i figure i must be ignorant of something really basic to be getting such horrible results with even default settings.

also, i have an xp-mobile @ 2200Mhz, and right now during encoding i am getting ~7-10fps. what is that about? shouldn't it be a lot faster than that?