Is there a way to pipe video from quicktime into x264?

[nm]

Originally Posted by Electron.Rotoscope

Cool thanks, I'll try that out! Would you recommend one over the other? Or should I just do my own speed tests?

Both commands do basically the same thing, so they will run equally fast.

Originally Posted by Electron.Rotoscope

Oh hey, could I do something like

mplayer -benchmark -vo yuv4mpeg:file=>(x264 --demuxer y4m --bitrate 2000 -o vid.264 -) -ao pcm:fast:file=>(NeroAacEnc -ignorelength -cbr 96000 -if - -of aud.aac) source.avi

to feed to separate audio and video tracks at the same time?

Yep, that should work.

Originally Posted by Electron.Rotoscope

Unfortunately I need a solution that runs in Mac/OSX also, and I'm told that AviSynth is unusable on OSX due to a lack of VFW (not that I claim to know what that is).

Well, AviSynth doesn't depend on VFW that much -- x264, ffmpeg, MPlayer and avs2yuv call it directly. Most of AviSynth could be ported to other operating systems if someone had the time and will.

But currently you need Wine to run AviSynth on OS X. It should work pretty well, except for DirectShow input. I haven't tried QTSource.

[Electron.Rotoscope]

Originally Posted by nm

Both commands do basically the same thing, so they will run equally fast.



Yep, that should work.

A-maaaa-zing

Well, AviSynth doesn't depend on VFW that much -- x264, ffmpeg, MPlayer and avs2yuv call it directly. Most of AviSynth could be ported to other operating systems if someone had the time and will.

But currently you need Wine to run AviSynth on OS X. It should work pretty well, except for DirectShow input. I haven't tried QTSource.

Is the version at http://avisynth3.unite-video.com/ worth trying to compile at all?

I've seen other people recommending Wine but... I dunno, it seems so icky. And I worry about performance, if I encode a feature length blu-ray it's already like 24 hours of rendering time or more. Plus it would make it less portable right? Like Wine would have to be installed on any box that tries to use it? My hope is that if I can put the right codecs into mplayer at build time and make it all static, I can just put the binaries into other Mac boxes and spread out where we do the encoding.
Plus I don't think the Chief Computer Person here would like me installing Wine at all, for fear it'll break other things.

[LoRd_MuldeR]

Originally Posted by Electron.Rotoscope

Is the version at http://avisynth3.unite-video.com/ worth trying to compile at all?

Probably not. AFAIK the Avisynth 3 project is pretty much dead

Originally Posted by Electron.Rotoscope

I've seen other people recommending Wine but... I dunno, it seems so icky. And I worry about performance

Wine, as the name implies, is not an emulator.

It basically is a loader for PE executable, which otherwise can't load under Linux/Unix, plus a collection of DLL's that provide a Win32-compatible API layer, which is necessary to make Win32 application work under Linux/Unix.

Thus the performance hit shouldn't be that big. That plus: You can run Avisynth+avs2yuv under Wine and from there pipe to a "native" encoder process...

[Electron.Rotoscope]

Originally Posted by LoRd_MuldeR

Wine, as the name implies, is not an emulator.

It basically is a loader for PE executable, which otherwise can't load under Linux/Unix, plus a collection of DLL's that provide a Win32-compatible API layer, which is necessary to make Win32 application work under Linux/Unix.

Thus the performance hit shouldn't be that big. That plus: You can run Avisynth+avs2yuv under Wine and from there pipe to a "native" encoder process...

Oy. I might just start doing that. I do wonder about scaling and deinterlacing using mplayer and whether it would be better to use avs instead. I know it'll hit resistance but maybe...

[TheFluff]

There's no point in trying to run Avisynth under Wine for you, since the part you want is DirectShowSource and that doesn't work under Wine anyway. AFAIK the only multipurpose source filter that works reliably in Avisynth under Wine is FFmpegSource, and since you said there's no FFmpeg decoder for your codec, that won't help you at all.

Avisynth 3 has been very dead for years and even when it was "alive" it was mostly vaporware.

[Electron.Rotoscope]

Originally Posted by TheFluff

There's no point in trying to run Avisynth under Wine for you, since the part you want is DirectShowSource and that doesn't work under Wine anyway. AFAIK the only multipurpose source filter that works reliably in Avisynth under Wine is FFmpegSource, and since you said there's no FFmpeg decoder for your codec, that won't help you at all.

Avisynth 3 has been very dead for years and even when it was "alive" it was mostly vaporware.

Darnit! At least that saves me the trouble of trying. Do you happen to know about QTSource? Or something else that'll call system quicktime decoders at runtime? As I said I'm currently looking at just building whatever decoders I need into mplayer, if I can ever get mplayer to compile.

[nm]

Originally Posted by TheFluff

There's no point in trying to run Avisynth under Wine for you, since the part you want is DirectShowSource and that doesn't work under Wine anyway.

QTSource doesn't seem to use DirectShow for anything. It uses QuickTime though, and I don't know if it works well enough with Wine.

[TheFluff]

Originally Posted by nm

QTSource doesn't seem to use DirectShow for anything. It uses QuickTime though, and I don't know if it works well enough with Wine.

It might actually work, unless Apple decided to finally remove the old Carbon API's. I haven't tested it though.

[Electron.Rotoscope]

Originally Posted by nm

The first command is missing a "-" to let x264 know that it should read standard input:

mplayer -nosound -benchmark -vo yuv4mpeg:file=>(x264 --demuxer y4m --bitrate 2000 -o p.264 -) dvd1.mkv

The second command (mkfifo ...) also works fine when using the correct filename, as you pointed out. As a minor adjustment, I'd swap x264 and mplayer the other way around so that mplayer is put to background and x264 to foreground. x264 terminates later than mplayer.

Got the swap to work, it behaves much less annoyingly while it's running now, thanks!

The "-" thing doesn't seem to work though. Works fine in the command line, totally looks great, but I think OSX's bash script must not have the capability, because it freaks out as soon as I put #!/bin/bash in front of it and run it as a .sh script. I guess I'll just stick to the named pipes.

[nm]

Originally Posted by Electron.Rotoscope

The "-" thing doesn't seem to work though. Works fine in the command line, totally looks great, but I think OSX's bash script must not have the capability, because it freaks out as soon as I put #!/bin/bash in front of it and run it as a .sh script.

Did you put #!/bin/bash on its own line before the mplayer command? I don't see why it wouldn't work then, and it does work within Bash script files on Linux.

[Electron.Rotoscope]

Originally Posted by nm

Did you put #!/bin/bash on its own line before the mplayer command? I don't see why it wouldn't work then, and it does work within Bash script files on Linux.

I know right? I swear it's just something the Mac version of bash weirdly just doesn't support.

[Reimar]

Originally Posted by Electron.Rotoscope

If I were coming from ProRes, I'd be able to use MPlayer (at least, according to http://doom10.org/index.php?topic=1822.msg8476#msg8476) but as far as I can understand that solution won't work for anything other than ProRes.

It also will work with cineform, the original discussion/patch was here: http://lists-archives.org/mplayer-de...how-codec.html
and it has been integrated since.
From a technical standpoint it is nearly the same as using Wine, however it should be simpler from an end-user standpoint since you only need the mplayer/mencoder binary and the Cineform DIrectShow codec binary.
In addition MPlayer can use QuickTime codecs, too, but you need to set it up correctly in its codecs.conf and I have some doubts that's something you'll manage easily.

[Electron.Rotoscope]

Originally Posted by Reimar

It also will work with cineform, the original discussion/patch was here: http://lists-archives.org/mplayer-de...how-codec.html
and it has been integrated since.
From a technical standpoint it is nearly the same as using Wine, however it should be simpler from an end-user standpoint since you only need the mplayer/mencoder binary and the Cineform DIrectShow codec binary.
In addition MPlayer can use QuickTime codecs, too, but you need to set it up correctly in its codecs.conf and I have some doubts that's something you'll manage easily.

Yeah I don't mind building the decoders in when I compile. I'm okay getting the GUIDs and the .ax files, still looking into details of how to make proper new codecs.conf entries, but at least mplayer is compiling now! I think it ultimately just is my solution, not ffmpeg, and I'll just use a separate mp4 muxer

[Reimar]

Originally Posted by Electron.Rotoscope

Yeah I don't mind building the decoders in when I compile. I'm okay getting the GUIDs and the .ax files, still looking into details of how to make proper new codecs.conf entries

There already is a codecs.conf entry for the .ax file. The problem is though that you need to find an older version, the current v5 version will only work on Windows (for now).
You might have better luck with the .qtx component, and codecs.conf entries for it should be easier to create (just look for existing ones with "driver qtvideo" as examples), but nobody has done that so far.

[Electron.Rotoscope]

Originally Posted by Reimar

There already is a codecs.conf entry for the .ax file. The problem is though that you need to find an older version, the current v5 version will only work on Windows (for now).
You might have better luck with the .qtx component, and codecs.conf entries for it should be easier to create (just look for existing ones with "driver qtvideo" as examples), but nobody has done that so far.

I was wondering about the version. So even if I find the latest .ax it won't work? Damnit. I'll see what I can do about bringing in the .qtx, I certainly have the filter...

[Reimar]

Originally Posted by Electron.Rotoscope

I was wondering about the version. So even if I find the latest .ax it won't work?

Previous versions will work. And if you update to latest MPlayer the version included in the current NeoPlayer (http://www.cineform.com/downloads/Ne...328-110628.zip) should work as well.