No Audio in AVI produced from Quicktime generated by iMovie

[whitedb]

In the past I have used ffmpegx to generate Mpeg4 files from my iMovie projects. However, my recent efforts resulted in no audio in the converted AVI file. It may be a change in Quicktime as I have an old .mov file from a previous project (made with QT6) that worked OK with the settings I'm applying.

I have iMovie 4 with Quicktime 7. I export using the expert settings to a Quicktime movie. (If I export to a dv file I do get sound). I did not use the reference Movie in the iMovie project as ffmpegX does not work with this.

I am using ffmpegX version 0.9ur2 and a PAL video source.

For the conversion I used the .mov to AVI DivX using mencoder. I tried to use different audio tracks, 1, 2 3, and 4 but still got no sound. (I ended up saving a short section my movie as the 5 second clip option does not work at all)

Any suggestions appreciated.

[Jacke]

Just so I understand your workflow; you edit in iMovie, export to .mov and then encode to DivX with ffmpegX.

And the problem is that when you encode the file you get from iMovie it plays without sound in Quicktime, but when you encode an earlier .mov file with the same settings the resulting AVI plays with sound.

What settings do you use when making the QT files from iMovie?
When you get info on the files (your newly made files and the old .mov file), what are the sound properties?

And what settings do you use for sound in ffmpegX?

Do you have DivX installed?

[whitedb]

Workflow: Yes, that is correct.

The Quicktime movie I generate from iMove plays fine in Quicktime and has sound. When I encode it to DivX with ffmegX there is no audio.

A Quicktime movie, produce by the same workflow but using an earlier version of iMovie and QT has audio when played in QT and the resultant Divx file also has audio.

To export from iMovie I use the QT movie and have PAL at 25fps for the audio it was linear pcm stereo at 48khz with a 16bit sample size.

If I use get movie properties in QT for both files, they seem to have the same properties for audio.

Old file Format: DV - PAL, 720 x 576, Millions
16-bit Integer (Big Endian), Stereo, 48.000 kHz

New file Format: 16-bit Integer (Big Endian), Stereo (L R), 48.000 kHz
DV - PAL, 720 x 576, Millions
(This is exactly as reported, there is a difference in the order and one is Stereo, the other Stereo (L,R))

For ffmpegX, I used the DivX preset for mencoder and just changed the video to be 4:3 rather than 16:9. The audio settings were unchanged. I did try alternate audio tracks, 0, 1, 2,3 but neither configuration gave audio.

For input it shows -
Video: dvvideo, yuv420p, 720x576
Audio: pcm_s16be, 48000 Hz, stereo, 1536 kb/s

Output: mencoder mpeg4, 640x480, 1265 kbps, 25 fps, no crop
mp3, 48000 Hz, 128 kbps

I have DivX installed via Toast 7.

Thanks for your interest.

[future318]

I'm having the same problem with converting a .mov file exported from iMovie 6 to an Xvid .avi file using the latest version of ffmpegX 0.0.9w

The only solution I've found is to export using "Movie to DV stream", which generates huge source files but it's the only way I've found.

This doesn't happen with all files exported from iMovie. In this case, the problem file is using only JPEGs inserted into the timeline and a few titles, along with a single music track.

[Metrophage]

I have been trying to use QuickTime encoded MP4 files in FFmpegX and was experiencing the same lack of sound with any codecs I tried. The solution I found to that is to check the "invert audio" box in the audio tab. I cannot be certain about the files you are using, but it seems that with mine QTs stream 0 is audio, and stream 1 is video. FFmpegX expects these to be the (more typical) other way around. The inversion just tells the application to call the video stream 0 and the audio stream 1.

Meanwhile, this has resulted in new challenges for me, as you can read in my other posts.

I hope this helps you!
M

[future318]

Checking the "Invert mapping" check box in the Audio tab of ffmpegX 0.0.9w does not fix my problem.

The prime suspect for me are the plugins installed into QuickTime. I'm running the Flip WMV and DivX plugins with QT 7.3.1, and I figure one of them may be interfering with ffmpegX decoding of the audio in my iMovie-output .mp4 (Full Quality) file...?

It's a guess at this point, and re-installing QuickTime 7.1.3 doesn't appear to fix the problem either.

[Metrophage]

Those plugins should be in either:
(root)/Library/Quicktime
or
(root)/System/Library/Quicktime
so you can move them elsewhere and restart to test whether or not they cause these problems.
M

[future318]

I've removed WMV and other QuickTime plugins, reinstalled QT 7.1.3.

Much to my dismay, I still get no audio track in iMovie 6.0.3 exported (Full Quality) files converted to MPEG-4 .avi file using ffpmegX.