Avidemux General Problems and Encoding

[Garibaldi]

I've had avidemux2 installed for awhile now on my slackware box. I've been messing around with it and have just had a ton of problems. I was able to get a pretty good version by installing from CVS, but when I encode an XviD encoded avi to dvd mpeg with lavcodec the picture quality is still quite a bit worse, even with really high bitrate settings. Are there still some bugs with the video rendering engine or something?

[burnman99]

Garibaldi, Have you tried the Forum? It's located
http://avidemux.sourceforge.net/
Mean is really good about troubleshooting any problems you may have.

Hope this helps!

Rog

[Garibaldi]

Garibaldi, Have you tried the Forum? It's located
http://avidemux.sourceforge.net/
Mean is really good about troubleshooting any problems you may have.

Hope this helps!

I have posted a couple topics there, mean has helped me fix my audio export problem (the current CVS fixed it). In response to this he said that the original video wasn't that good and I shouldn't expect too good video coming out of it, but that's not true since I can visually see that the avi is better than the outputted mpeg. I will probably try posting there again though.

[Garibaldi]

posted one here: http://avidemux.berlios.de/forum/viewtopic.php?p=4560#4560

[disturbed1]

The rate control is just flat out f'd up. Doesn't matter what numbers you put in there, ffmpeg/avidemux does what it wants. Xvid rate control helps some when using quantized encoding.

To prove this, try setting a min bitrate of 5000 and max of 10000, unless you have some extremely high action sequences, you're avg bitrate will fall way below the min set rate.

This makes ffmpeg almost (lavcodec) almost useless in size calculations also. OF course, this was before "test 2" perhaps this version fixed that

I personally can't say I've seen horrible quality. From avi to DVD (using lavcodec) usually does drop a little quality, but not that much. Try adding one of the smoothers as a filter, only resizing to half D1, and set the quantizer at 2 with Xvid rate control and TMPG matrix.

Using mpeg2enc does yield better results, but at a serious speed hit.

BTW, you don't need transcode or ffmpeg installed, it comes bundled with avidemux http://avidemux.sourceforge.net/doc/en/output.xml.html

If you're using KDE (which I know you are ) there are a couple of GUIs for transcode and mencoder out there. Freshmeat has the sources, and linuxpackages has the tgz's for you. Also check out KDEnlive, I think that maybe the name, I know it has a K and live

[steven.ellis]

I use avidemux2 a lot for Xvid -> DVD and off air -> DVD

I find for an XVid -> DVD don't use the ffmpeg DVD encoder, but use mpeg2enc. If you aren't worried about size set a quantitizer of 3, max bit rate ot 8200 and 4:3. Make sure you have resized the video in the filters.

If i'm just going to watch a show I re-code the audio to 160Kb MP2.

I've done some HR.HD releases to 16:9 video and two pass that typically used a quantitisation level of 2 or 3 and the quality was excellent.

Steve

[Garibaldi]

Thanks for both your suggestions. Disturbed1, like you said I use KDE so I will check into a couple of those frontends, I have one installed called konverter, but it doesn't output mpeg 2.

[DaveQB]

If you're using KDE (which I know you are ) there are a couple of GUIs for transcode and mencoder out there. Freshmeat has the sources, and linuxpackages has the tgz's for you. Also check out KDEnlive, I think that maybe the name, I know it has a K and live

Can you elaborate on these GUI's please ??

A good frontend for ffmpeg and mencoder is encode2mpeg.

There's no GUI, but easy enough to use. I tried it today and it took in a lavcodec/vorbis coded mkv contained video and make an mpeg2 stream as well as the whole VIDEO_TS file structure with VOB and IFO's etc.


On a side note, why is avidemux so slow with mencoder/ffmpeg encoding compared to command line mencoder/ffmpeg ??