Avidemux crashes with many, many MP4 files. How to handle?

[Diana (Cda)]

I've been working for quite some time now with Avidemux and am very pleased with it. It's replaced AGK for most of my file conversions; it's so much more versatile and supports more formats. But I do have a lot of problems with MP4s. If I've understood correctly, like AVIs, MP4s are a container format as so any number of things can go wrong. But I'd just like to know how to deal with the issue and get around the problems with this file format.

I get crash reports on probably about half the MP4s I'll try to convert with Avidemux. And I never know when that's going to happen. One workaround is to use a Windows Explorer enhancement I have to copy the file path to an 8.3 format that I then copy into Avidemux and that clears up a lot of the crash issues. Avidemux seems to have LFN issues sometimes! I figure that Avidemux being a frontend for basically a DOS program is why this helps (though I'm no expert so my interpretation of the issue could be off. That this helps in a lot of cases is the bottom line, though!).

When that doesn't work, I've chosen also to ignore the error:
"H.264 detected If the file is using B-frames as reference it can lead to a crash or stuttering. Avidemux can use another mode which is safe but YOU WILL LOSE FRAME ACCURACY.<br>Do you want to use that mode?"

and that sometimes has prevented a crash and allows Avidemux to work, yet hasn't created any problem that I can see whether or not there is frame accuracy problems. Everything so far plays okay in the media player I play avi files with now***.

Anyone have any suggestions on working with difficult MP4s? So far, all of them have played fine in VLC so I know the files are probably not the problem - I might just be missing some sort of MP4 codec. I use one of the K-Lite codec packs.

TIA for any help re this.







*** Rather than burning to DVD and playing AVIs in DVD player that way, I found an inexpensive media player from Wal-Mart for ±$53+taxes and just copy movies to a USB flash drive and view via that! It does a great job!

[Baldrick]

It crashes all the time here too so you are not alone. Avidemux use builtin codecs so you don't need any codecs.

Are you just converting with it? Then maybe you could try some else like xmedia recode.

You could also try latest beta build from http://avidemux.org/nightly/win32/ and see how it works....maybe worse...

[Diana (Cda)]

Darn, was afraid of the internal codecs issue and not being able to update that somehow. I guess the K-Lite pack only affects the other video software I have.

I'll give Xmedia Recode a try for these. I tend to only use that for video for my cell phone but I do have it so will give it a whirl for those MP4s Avidemux chokes on.

Thanks. Will report back.

[jagabo]

Yes, AviDemux is just not a robust program.

[davexnet]

I've found out that using the accompanying Avisynth proxy program alleviates a lot of the problems.
Frameserve the media file from the proxy to Avidemux.

I believe the proxy is included with recent releases of the program (do a custom install).

[mgh]

the proxy has been there for a long time.
i use avidemux primarily for cutting out clips from longer videos, and not for encoding.

[feelingshred]

Sorry for reviving old topic but when the developers of the program don't do something, we have to share the valuable info. I was just having crash after crash using the more recent version of avidemux, then I switched back to v2.5.5 (because it was the most downloaded of the old versions on sourceforge), and now I finally can convert my h264 video again without crashes and without weird artifacts on screen. I don't know what they tried to do with version 2.6.x but it's clearly not working.
To everybody out there, I strongly recommend using avidemux version 2.5.5 .