avi 2 DVD: audio encoding hanging

[BeardFan]

I was converting an avi (video:mpeg4, audio mp3 44100 Hz stereo 192 kb/s) to DVD with ffmpeg and the following happened:

Video converted fine, but audio converting keeps hanging. It creates a 4kB wav and the process keeps running forever, but nothing will come out of it. No error message, the running process just won't produce an audio file and the info stops at the stream mapping.

Anyone experienced a similar problem? One of my suspects is QT7, because the problem never occured with QT6.

[major]

Try using 'Decode with Quicktime'. Try playing your avi in Quicktime Player and check if it plays the audio.

[BeardFan]

QT won't play the mp3 audio (and plays the video only very jerky). Strange. Guess I'll try "decode with mplayer" and use mpeg2enc.

[alph]

I've encountered this hang as well.

What I've do is use the "Movie audio to ac3" preset to encode the audio after the video has encoded and the process has hung on the audio. This avoids having to redo the video, and in every case the audio has encoded perfectly. Once both are done I proceeded to multiplex and author manually in the tools tab.

Cheers,
Alph.

The only POSSIBLE hint to the problem I've found is that if I run those problematic AVIs through Divx Doctor the video and audio tracks are of different lengths by up to 15 seconds at times.

[BeardFan]

I also figured out the movie -> ac3, but unfortunately this prevents batch conversion (I usually convert several avis during night or while I'm at work since it really takes some time on my old machine).

Strange that the direct sound conversion works, but not movie+sound.

Is there a way to just produce the mpeg2 video for muxing? That way I could still make batch conversion, like converting avi 2 video and then convert avi 2 audio. Then I could mux them manually after the lengthy conversion.

[alph]

I think you could do batch video only and then audio only by unchecking the appropriate "encoded video" or "encode audio" checkbox in the respective tabs, but I've not tested it.

Alph

[BeardFan]

I tried it, but just unchecking the encode audio box won't work, because the resulting video is .mpg not .mpv or .m2v and won't be recognized for muxing.

So I still have to try out mpeg2enc with mplayer. Too bad that mpeg2enc is so frustatingly slooooooow on my machine.

[alph]

You just need to change the file extension and the muxing will work fine.

Cheers

[BeardFan]

OK, it worked with mpeg2enc decoding with mplayer. Too bad that this takes about four times longer than ffmpeg (nearly 5 hours for 25 minutes of video ).

[BeardFan]

I found out that this error definetely comes with Quicktime 7. Other files that worked before suddenly hung while audio decoding.

Now I've reinstalled Quicktime 6.5.2 and everything is fine.