Avi encoding stops at 9 minutes 56 seconds

[kringle]

Thanks, Major, for providing such a terrific program!!

It's worked flawlessly until I experienced a problem today converting a 40 minute DV stream to AVI. Using the DivX (libavc) NTSC preset in v0.0.7a, the encoding progesses quite well and the quality is excellent, however the encoding stops as though the file is complete at 9 minutes and 56 seconds.

I tried another lengthy file and the same result occurs.

I greatly appreciate any help you or any of the other forum members can offer.

[kringle]

Well, I've tried changing the DV file extension to .mov, exporting the DV to MOV, different bit rates, one pass encoding, two pass encoding, three pass encoding (results terribly out of synch!) and no such luck, I just can't seem to get ffmpeg to encode past 9 minutes and 56 seconds. (((

[irongang]

9 min 56 in DV sounds like about 2 gig. Old AVIs (Type-1, I think they were called) couldn't be more than 2GB. I wonder if the software is not reading past the 2GB point for some reason. I know that's not a solution but it's something to check into.

[kringle]

Yes, that makes sense! Thanks for pointing that out. The file is almost 8 GB and 39m46s long, therefore 9m56s (1/4 of the video) should equate to about 2 GB (1/4 of the file size). Now to find a way around it!!

[ravinnovitch]

well, that 9min 56 rings a bell. I have a similar problem :
by encoding a SVCD (mpeg2) from an iMovie project (6,12 GB) the encoding stops at min 56. The resulting mpeg2 however is 190 Mb. ffmpeg doesn't stop, but continues by encoding the audio and multiplexes that part well.

I don't think the problem is related to encoding an AVI. I don't have a solution neither.

Yes, that makes sense! Thanks for pointing that out. The file is almost 8 GB and 39m46s long, therefore 9m56s (1/4 of the video) should equate to about 2 GB (1/4 of the file size). Now to find a way around it!!

I just bumped into the exact same problem when trying to encode a project from a big (10GB) DV stream file. It looks like the ffmpeg-based components don't have a problem with big input files; I did a quick and dirty test using ffmpeg mp4, and although the audio was massively out of synch (probably a QT issue), at least it processed the whole thing.

Unfortunately for my project, the ffmpeg-based encoders produce ugly video (a lot of color bleed), while the mencoder-based components (specifically XViD and MP4 with all the bells and whistles) look spectacular. Has anybody found a workaround for this, or would you have to do something hideous like transcode the DV stream into a lightly compressed format to get the size under 2GB using QT, then go from there to low bitrate format?

Or perhaps it's not the mencoder component, but some other intermediary that's causing the problem...

Too bad, becuase I was about to declare ffmpegx (the frontend) to be the answer to my encoding prayers.

[willy_annand]

Use AVI_IO for capturing, it splits the AVI into 2GB or 4GB chunks and you can split the output over multiple hard drives. TMPGEnc is capable of handle the segmented AVIs as well.

[kringle]

I've found that if I export the DV stream to a .MOV format using the DV compressor and uncompressed audio, then it seems to work past the 00:09:56 point. It's an extra step but it seems to work. Alternatively, if you export to SVCD it works and you can in turn convert the SVCD into an AVI.