Bug at latest ffmpegX???

[Jirka Cech]

Hi,

I would like to report strange behaviour of ffmpegX. I've downloaded diskimage, instaled it, rip the DVD using latest MTR(MacTheRipper) and main feature only mode, get the VIDEO_TS dir of about 5.3 GB ....

Foloving the excelent Major's tutorial at
http://homepage.mac.com/major4/videots_divx.html

I finally pressed the Encode button to start the process and then the whole ffmpegX started to look VERY frozen, did not react to anything but kill -9 from terminal or Force Quit. There was spinning daisyflower next to the Encode button. No output files were created, no logg found, i believe no mencoder process running. The whole behaviour was repeatable. After playing with parameters, there was NO change.

Once it happens that I waited for 22:00 minutes and then, sudenly the progress bar appeared and all encoding started and did worked well.

I do not know what did happen during those 22 minutes, but I suggest one should mention the delay at tutorial otherwise most people will delete the whole excelent program and go for other

I do have iBook G4 1.2, fresh install of OS X 10.3.7, and MPlayerOSX instaled from before...

[major]

Sometimes with VIDEO_TS folders the prescanning (small spinning indicator next to the encode button) can take too much time. I will change this ASAP so as to make sure the delay is always very short.

[Jirka Cech]

is there some quick fix I can do until new release?
otherwise the app is quite unusable...you can not wait 22 min to start encoding just to make 5 sec test clip to figure out that you select 4:3 and should be 2.25:1.............

[major]

It should start immediately if you enable "Open terminal window".

[Jirka Cech]

TESTED before and now again, it does not start imediatelly. One has to wait 22 minutes.

[Riot Nrrrd]

If you enable the Terminal window, does it still take 22 minutes for the Terminal window to appear?

If you know UNIX you can open a different Terminal window and clamp a ktrace(1) onto the running "ffmpegX" process and see what happens (with "kdump -l") when you click "Encode" ...

[Jirka Cech]

someting like running FFmpegX, starting extra terminal and

mybox:~me$ ktrace -pi <FFMpegX pid> | kdump

[Riot Nrrrd]

I would run it from the start:

mybox:~me$ ktrace -d -i /Applications/ffmpegX.app/Contents/MacOS/ffmpegX

Once it's started, *then* you run kdump (in the same directory) - you don't run kdump in a pipe.

If you run kdump -l then it will keep giving you continuous output (sort of like tail -f on a log file that keeps getting new things added to the end), and then you can watch and see what happens in that kdump -l output window when your "22 minute pregnant pause" starts.

[Jirka Cech]

I intended to paste an output here, but no way..it produces some HUGE files. trace.out is 300 M after first 20 seconds once ENCODE was pressed.

ffmpegX started, VIDEO_TS loaded, then:
0-d-93-c9-d9-64: ~jik$ ktrace -i -p 530
pressing ENCODE, small delay, than spinning daisyflower, waiting ~20 sec
0-d-93-c9-d9-64: ~jik$ ktrace -C
0-d-93-c9-d9-64:~ jik$ kdump trace.out > dump.txt
0-d-93-c9-d9-64:~ jik$ du -h ktrace.out dump.txt
290M ktrace.out
783M dump.txt

[major]

OK, I will check for a fix in next version.

[Riot Nrrrd]

The way to run it in this case is

ktrace -d -i /Applications/ffmpegX.app/Contents/MacOS/ffmpegX

The prompt will return right away and then you can do

kdump -l

When you hit the start of the 22 minute pause (or is it down to 20 seconds now?!?), look at the window with the scrolling kdump -l outputand see what it's doing right at that moment. That might give you an idea ... if it is going off into the ozone, you'll see NO output at the end of the kdump -l, meaning the process(es) is stuck in CPU spin-lock until it "breaks free".