Please Intel Mac Users Take a look at this

[Man Dat Ting]

I have had a serious problem with FFMPEGX since apple came out with Intel machines.
I posted this issue already in forum.videohelp.com/topic321411.html.
Mplayer crashes every time I run FFMEGX while attempting to add subtitles to AVI files and or creating a VIDEO_TS foder which includes subtitles in srt format.
The error tells me MPLAYER can't find the font I use ofor the subtitles plus other random assorted errors. Random as they seem to be different each time, although the file I try to work with is the same, and I change nothing in my encoding options. The process ends immediately (either in the terminal or in the PRGRESS app), and I find all kinds of different reasons ehy this happened. I do not quote them as they are always different while I do nothing different before attempting to work with the app. It feels as if the Intel macs get loaded with some sort of misleading or wrong instruction which deeply interfere with the several processes involved in using FFMEPGX as a GUI for the Unix commands involved.

This also happens while using MOVIEGATE. After the Intel happened I was never able to create any DVDs at all, with or without subtitles.

"Occasionally" everything works fine, but only if I shut down my Intel gear: MAcBookPro, MacBook, MacMini, and I lunch FFMEGX with everything else closed: I manage to get my subs either hardcoded on the AVIs, or as option in DVD. Occasionally, not always, because sometimes it still does not work no matter if I use the terminal or Progress. Yet even if I manage to get my subs at the end of the process I still always get the MPLAYER errors. If I continue using the app without shutting the computer down nothing works again.

I use MPEG STREAMCLIP to resize convert and so on nothing ever goes wrong. So I don't understand. I thouigh both applications dealt with the same UNIX commands .... but I am no programmer and I don't know.

All the INTEL machines come with the maximum RAM, the latest OS version I tried different ver. of Quicktime as I was told some were far too buggy to be true.

I would like to get feedback from other Intel Mac useres. In my old PowerBook this never happened, and I kept this machine only to use FFMEGX and MovieGate (which does not work either).

So: either I always instal some other application in my Intels which makes MPLAYER and or FFMPEGX not working. But I don't know which as they are all pretty standard, except for Little Snitch, and Fruit Menu.

Can anyone give me a hint? There must be some Intel Mac User who subtitles films using FFMEGX, or is this option redundant for most? I am not interested in getting a detail technical explaination, but I want to know if anybody has the same problem.

Of*course any suggestion is welcome, so I can use software allowing me to add subtitles either hard-coding them in the picture or as an option while creating a DVD I would be very happy. I do not like DVD Studio Pro, and for Apple machinese there is no software that I know which allows adding subtitles.

[levdr]

I have an Intel Mac and having problems with MPlayer when working with ffmpegX as well. That's why I came here. I'm trying to convert a VIDEO_TS file into an .avi file and need the subs to be included. So, since I'm new to all this, I'm trying out the different options and I need MPlayer to give me a preview of what I'm doing. MPlayer starts up ok, plays ok, but there doesn't seem to be an option to stop the preview. Once MPlayer starts, ffmpegX is inaccessable and within MPlayer there's no 'pause' button or some other way to stop it from playing. So I click the red button in the upper left corner. Then MPlayer quits altogether and I get a window telling me that MPlayer crashed and what do I want to do? I tell it to leave it at that and when I'm lucky it will, when I'm not lucky it keeps starting up and up and up and so I have to force it to stop (cmnd+option+esc). Also, when MPlayer crashes, I get an arm's length report from ffmpegX telling me that MPlayer crashed 'by bad usage of CPU/FPU/RAM' and that I should 'Recompile MPlayer with --enable-debug and make a 'gdb' backtrace and disassembly'. I have no idea what all this means. ffmpegX also tells me all sorts of things about this or that invalid whatever, or that the seleccted video-out device is incompatible with this codec, which is rubbish since I wouldn't be getting errors like this if MPlayer wouldn't crash. So, like you I'm curious as to what's going on here. And since I have never worked with ffmpegX and MPlayer on any other Mac, I would at least like to know how one can (or ought to be able to) pause MPlayer in ffmpegX.

[Case]

[andyx181x]

if i were you guys and if the option was possible, use handbrake to extract the movie for you and automatically embed the subs, it can read video_ts folders as well

[Man Dat Ting]

The point is not extracting but inserting and Handbrake doesn't.

[abcarracho]

Li ho bo / Ni hao, Man dat Ting:

I suggest two possible solutions to the problem. I offer the first of my suggestions because it is what solved the same problem for me on my Intel Macintosh. The other suggestion is based on a remarkable similarity of content between the screenshot from your earlier thread and the content of an item from daringfireball.com.

1.) Apparently, MPlayer chokes on troublesome fonts. As soon as I used FontBook to validate all my fonts and deactivate the duplicates, the problems with MPlayer went away. It was as simple as that. I've been using ffmpegX to add subtitles ever since, and I haven't had any more problems.

2.) Although the "Daring Fireball" site is referred to as a blog, I consider its author, John Gruber, to be a gifted essayist. His explanation of why FruitMenu -- or, rather, what quietly comes in unannounced in FruitMenu's company -- is very possibly the cause of your problem. http://daringfireball.net/2006/01/smart_crash_reports. Yes, I know what a useful item FruitMenu is, and many people consider it nearly essential. Read what Gruber has to say. I'll say my share in rwo words: Input Menu.

As for other Mac software, the application "VLC" (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/) is able to add subtitles to a variety of formats, either in passthrough mode or as part of a transcoding process, and can either burn them in or include them as DVD options. VLC is pretty much thought of as only a player, but the encoding assets are there in the streaming/exporting Wizard menus if you care to look into it. (The Wizard has two modes of entry with different options; read the help docs.)

[levdr]

Oh my God, this actually worked! Ni hao to you abcarracho! And thank you so much. I did the FontBook thingy, started ffmpegX, tried to get the MPlayer to crash again and I couldn't. It hasn't crashed once since I cleaned up my fonts, not in ffmpegX, not in Moviegate, not in any other application that uses MPlayer. I have also read the very interesting Gruber article and made a few adjustments .

And Case, thanks for your list. Very helpful indeed!

andyx181x, Handbrake can indeed insert subs, but only hard subs, which is not want I want. I always only include soft subs (i.e. selectable subs) in my moviefiles (like Man Dat Ting by shape of a separate file (.srt, .sub, .ass etc.).

But anyway, my problem seems to be solved. Thank you very much!

regards,
Lev

[Man Dat Ting]

I guess it does work because I took off all my 2BYTE fonts and left only the latin fonts (as a test) and it worked too. Unfortunately I need Chinese so for now I'm stuck to the PPC Machine. The question is perhaps that on top of the Intel problems now there are the Leopard problems and this could be a reason for the MPLAYER developper not to fix it

[Man Dat Ting]

BTW as for Fruit Menu (which I used) it is a major headache. I disabled it but I guess I should reinstall from scratch as almost every time I opened the console and the crash reporter log Fruit Menu and its other incarnation always caused some kind of problem I cannot decode as I understand little or nothing in UNIX and more but certainly it isn't a gentle piece of software and it does patch the system in strange ways