x264 doesn't encode h.264

[thuriel]

Hi!

I already was searching for a solution to this problem. There are many posts all over the internet with the same problem but no solution.

So maybe you could help me.

Whenever I try to use x264 to encode a video with ffmpeg an my Snow Leopard MacBook 1,1 ffmpeg stops and tells me:

Error while opening encoder for output stream #0.0 - maybe incorrect parameters such as bit_rate, rate, width or height

The parameters don't seem to affect this. No matter what I do, the error remains. For example

-vcodec libx264 -b 1024k

results in the above error. Even

-vcodec copy

leads to the error (if the source is H.264/AVC of course).

I compiled ffmpeg and x264 by my own.

For x264 I used the snapshot of "x264-snapshot-20090926-2245" but even with the latest one (x264-snapshot-20091015-2245) I had the same problems. I had to use the

--disable-asm

configure option.

The version and configure options amoung other information regarding ffmpeg you may see here:

$ ffmpeg -version
FFmpeg version SVN-r20028, Copyright (c) 2000-2009 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
  built on Oct 16 2009 03:31:04 with gcc 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5646)
  configuration: --enable-pthreads --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libtheora --enable-libvorbis --enable-gpl --enable-libxvid --enable-libx264 --enable-nonfree --enable-libfaac --enable-libfaad
  libavutil     50. 3. 0 / 50. 3. 0
  libavcodec    52.36. 0 / 52.36. 0
  libavformat   52.39. 0 / 52.39. 0
  libavdevice   52. 2. 0 / 52. 2. 0
  libswscale     0. 7. 1 /  0. 7. 1
FFmpeg SVN-r20028
libavutil     50. 3. 0 / 50. 3. 0
libavcodec    52.36. 0 / 52.36. 0
libavformat   52.39. 0 / 52.39. 0
libavdevice   52. 2. 0 / 52. 2. 0
libswscale     0. 7. 1 /  0. 7. 1

I don't know why it worked on Leopard. I don't know what I did differently back then :/

[rumplestiltskin]

I don't suppose you'd want to use the H264 encoding already built in to your Mac? Try MPEG Streamclip, VideoMonkey or even QuickTime Player Pro (7).

[thuriel]

Yeah, you're right. Thank you, but I'd like to use ffmpeg (I wrote some scripts that rely on ffmpeg). And what bothers me...it worked before (on Leopard). Did I miss some dependencies (I did a clean install of Snow Leopard)? But I don't remember installing anything else than x264 and ffmpeg to encode H.264 video with ffmpeg on Leopard :/

[rumplestiltskin]

I think your problem might be with the interaction of SL and ffmpeg. Who knows what Apple may have changed between L & SL? I think you're correct in your installation assumption (nothing extra should be needed).

However, I just noticed that you compiled ffmpeg & x264 yourself. Have you tried using the pre-compiled versions instead? If they work, maybe it's something that went awry in the compiling.

[thuriel]

Now I tried the ffmpeg binary from the lates ffmpegX release. That one seems to work though of course linking to its own libs inside the ffmpegX bundle. Not really what I want :/

I discovered, that there is no "libx264.dylib" in /usr/local/lib/ (only the "libx264.a"). Therefore otool returned no dynamic lib for x264.

So! Hoping that was the reason for my problem I recompiled x264 with --enable-shared. Like I expected, it built the .dylib (what seems to be Mac OS X's equivalent to Linux's .so?).

After recompiling ffmpeg as well, otool gives me:

$ otool -L /usr/local/bin/ffmpeg 
/usr/local/bin/ffmpeg:
	/usr/lib/libz.1.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1.2.3)
	/usr/lib/libbz2.1.0.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1.0.5)
	/usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 123.0.0)
	/usr/local/lib/libfaac.0.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1.0.0)
	/usr/local/lib/libfaad.2.dylib (compatibility version 3.0.0, current version 3.0.0)
	/usr/local/lib/libmp3lame.0.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1.0.0)
	/usr/local/lib/libtheora.0.dylib (compatibility version 4.0.0, current version 4.10.0)
	/usr/local/lib/libogg.0.dylib (compatibility version 7.0.0, current version 7.0.0)
	/usr/local/lib/libvorbisenc.2.dylib (compatibility version 3.0.0, current version 3.6.0)
	/usr/local/lib/libvorbis.0.dylib (compatibility version 5.0.0, current version 5.3.0)
	/usr/local/lib/libx264.76.dylib (compatibility version 0.0.0, current version 0.0.0)

Cool, but doesn't help at all. Same problem :/

But! The compatibility version as well as the current version looks interesting for libx264 o_O

[rumplestiltskin]

You're now going down such a technical route that the adhesive tape holding my glasses together has fallen off.
*grin*


I'll have to defer to others who may understand this techno-babble better than I.

[houdini2]

Add --arch=x86_64 in ./configure

houdini

[thuriel]

@rumplestiltskin: *lol* ...but thank you anyway!

@houdini2: I tried this. Same error message :/ ...but as far as I know the CPU in the first generation MacBooks (like mine) is 32bit, so I think the correct configure option is --arch=i386, which is the default :\

[Herve]

my configure command, used for SnowLeopard:
"./configure --enable-postproc --enable-gpl --enable-pthreads --enable-static --disable-shared --enable-gray --enable-avfilter --enable-avfilter-lavf --enable-libx264 --extra-cflags=-m64 --extra-ldflags=-m64 --arch=x86_64"

bye

Edit: oops I didn't see that your processor wasn't 64bit, so -normally- you don't need to specify anything special (32bit is the default behavior)…

[thuriel]

Thank you all. I'm a bit confused about all the error messages I get. At least I could find the reason for the error I described above:

Obviously I have to use a preset for encoding with x264 (in Leopard I was able to encode without this). For example:

-vpre hq

So, with the preset setting I can encode with x264. But that actually isn't (all) what I want to do, because my source file already is encoded in H.264. Even the audio stream already is encoded in the codec of my choice: AC3. I just want to change the container from MKV to MP4:

$ ffmpeg -i video.mkv -vcodec copy -acodec copy video.mp4

but, what I get is a similar error message to the above one:

Could not write header for output file #0 (incorrect codec parameters ?)

Does ffmpeg fail in putting AC3 into the MP4 container? I know, initially MP4 did not support AC3 streams, but over a year ago they officially allowed AC3 to be enclosed in an MP4 (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_container_formats). So I expect ffmpeg to be aware of that and fulfill my wish!

Do I have to to specify any parameters to pack AC3 into MP4?

Because this is off topic, I opened another thread: https://forum.videohelp.com/topic374557.html