Very SLOW Avi Mux-ing on OSX Lion

[James Keller]

Has anyone else had an issue with this? It takes FOREVER to try to MUX an AVI file ever since I updated to Lion ... I have to keep reverting to Snow Leopard to get things done... Is there a fix out there?

[rumplestiltskin]

I can't speak -directly- to this issue except to say I was also experiencing terrible performance under a Lion upgrade until I backed everything up, wiped out the hard drive completely, and then reinstalled Lion from scratch (without an existing Snow Leopard installation). Same experience with Mountain Lion; something I must have had installed in SL made Lion and ML performance suck. The "virgin" Lion and ML installs work flawlessly (but I don't do AVI except converting -from- AVI to MP4 with MP4Tools).

[Case]

It seems there may be something wrong with the AVI muxing in ffmpegX 0.0.9y-Lion.
I got a weird error on AVI muxing with the GUI ("Could not find sync stream #0.1").
I got a WAY too big output file after a very long time, on using the Terminal with the ffmpeg binary from ffmpegX 0.0.9y-Lion (process manually aborted at 300% of expected final output size).

I did get a properly muxed AVI file (1.48 GB in just 15 seconds) on the command line with an updated ffmpeg binary (not associated with ffmpegX).

ffmpeg -i foo-video.avi -i foo-audio.ac3 -vcodec copy -acodec copy foo-muxed.avi

[James Keller]

@rumplestiltskin: Hmmmmm.. that's interesting.... I'm not about to try to start a fresh instal of Lion though... too much of a P.I.T.A.
I wonder if if if could be a some residual leftovers from rosetta ... Oh I wish I had enough brains to know how to figure that out...

[James Keller]

It seems there may be something wrong with the AVI muxing in ffmpegX 0.0.9y-Lion.
I got a weird error on AVI muxing with the GUI ("Could not find sync stream #0.1").
I got a WAY too big output file after a very long time, on using the Terminal with the ffmpeg binary from ffmpegX 0.0.9y-Lion (process manually aborted at 300% of expected final output size).

I did get a properly muxed AVI file (1.48 GB in just 15 seconds) on the command line with an updated ffmpeg binary (not associated with ffmpegX).

ffmpeg -i foo-video.avi -i foo-audio.ac3 -vcodec copy -acodec copy foo-muxed.avi

I wouldn't get error codes like that (not that I know of anyway) but after a Looooooooong time the files I would get after a mix would be huge in size as well.

I'll try to install that binary and see what happens

[James Keller]

Well I downloaded it... now what do I do

[jman98]

I have not used OSX beyond Snow Leopard but I work with a bunch of hard core Apple fanboys. Their advice has been to do a fresh OS install instead of trying to upgrade the OS in place to a new version. So I am not surprised to read rumplestiltskin's post.

James - You have to run ffmpeg on the command line. If you do not know how to do that, there's not much else we can do to help you. You might do some research into how to run command line programs under OSX (hint - open Terminal to get a command line window).

[Case]

Well I downloaded it... now what do I do

1/ Unzip.
2/ Move the Unix Executable File to /usr/local/bin/ . Not strictly necessary, but it makes it so much easier later on, if it is in a location where Terminal knows about it. This may be tricky if you don't know how, as /usr is an invisible system directory. Finder: menu Go > Go to Folder... type: /usr . Look for the folder "local". If it doesn't exist, create it. Open it. Look for the folder "bin". If it doesn't exist, create it. Open it. Move the ffmpeg binary to there. Done.
3/ Open Terminal.app. (You can find it in Utilities.) You should see a small window with two lines of text: "Last login: <date> on ttys000" (or similar) and "<computer-name>:~ username$ "
4/ Test. Type: ffmpeg -version . Enter. This should list this ffmpeg version number, its compile options and versions of various libraries. It is (as always) followed by the "prompt" (with the $ sign), just like line 2.
5/ Using the Terminal basics: The "~" symbol above represents the user home directory. It is the current working directory. Any filename without a path is thought to be about a file that resided in the working directory, as far as Terminal is concerned. Rather than changing the working directory all the time, you may enter a full path in Terminal. Apple made this extra easy by support for drag-and-drop: if you drop a file icon anywhere on the Terminal window, Terminal will see that as input of the filename with its full path.
6/ Use the muxing command line from my previous post:
Type ffmpeg -i (with a space at the end), then drag-and-drop the first input file, type -i (with a space at the end), then drag-and-drop the second input file, type -vcodec copy -acodec copy (with a space at the end), then drag-and-drop your first file, then use backspace to erase the last bit, add -muxed.avi (no space before it) to make a unique output name. Finally hit Enter.
Terminal with "print" what ffmpeg is doing in the Terminal. When done, you'll see the "prompt" again.

Good luck!