AVANTI - FFmpeg/Avisynth GUI (support thread).

[NighthawkGuy]

Referring to the general summary of features of ffmpeg, listed here: https://www.videohelp.com/tools/ffmpeg
"FFmpeg is a complete solution to record, convert and stream audio and video. It is a command line tool to convert one video file format to another. It also supports grabbing and encoding in real time from a TV card."

How exactly can this mentioned function of real time capture and encode from a TV tuner card be done with ffmpeg?
This is a feature I have been looking for quite some time, a way to realtime encode into MPEG-2 and AC3 that ffmpeg supports.

[Chris K]

There are a lot of FFmpeg capabilities that I never tried. FFmpeg is Linux based and many of the examples you can come across, like using pipes etc. do not work in Windows. This is a example from the docs for video and audio grabbing;

If you specify the input format and device then ffmpeg can grab video and audio directly.

ffmpeg -f oss -i /dev/dsp -f video4linux2 -i /dev/video0 /tmp/out.mpg

Note that you must activate the right video source and channel before launching ffmpeg with any TV viewer such as xawtv (http://linux.bytesex.org/xawtv/) by Gerd Knorr. You also have to set the audio recording levels correctly with a standard mixer.

You can see it all refers to Linux. You could try Google to find out if there are some Windows examples.

[Chris K]

How exactly can this mentioned function of real time capture and encode from a TV tuner card be done with ffmpeg?

I did some research and experiments on the subject. FFmpeg offers the -f vfwcap options for Windows.

Your capture device (TV tuner) needs to have a vfw (Video for Windows) driver available. As described in the Linux example, "you must activate the right video source and channel before launching ffmpeg".

To check out the available vfw drivers, you can use this on the Avanti command line;

-new -r 29.97 -f vfwcap -i list

If you run this you should get a list of available vfw drivers (if any).

[vfwcap @ 0143a720] Driver 0
[vfwcap @ 0143a720] Microsoft WDM Image Capture (Win32)
[vfwcap @ 0143a720] Version: 5.0.2195.6655

list: Input/output error

My capture device has only a DirectShow driver so I can't use the -f vfwcap option. If you find a valid vfw driver on your system, you need to use the driver number as input e.g.;

-new -r 29.97 -f vfwcap -i 3 -dvs -das -y "@destin1"

Above example is a basic -new command line that should be able to grab the output of device number 3. Since you have a fast system, it might be interresting to play around a bit with it.

Note that when I try this without having a valid driver set up, FFmpeg hangs and even the Windows taskmanager isn't able to "kill" the process and shutdown my system. Have to do it the hard way. It could be system specific because the same happens with VirtualDub if I do not set up the driver properly. The -i list option mentioned above is safe and FFmpeg will not hang on it.

[NighthawkGuy]

Thanks for the great info on ffmpeg video capture under Windows!
Unfortunately modern video capture devices don't seem to provide old VFW capture drivers anymore.
I have used various ATI All-In-Wonder video cards with TV tuner and video capture for the past 15 years and they switched to directshow about 10 years ago.

Since ATI got bought out by AMD a few years back they unfortunately have stopped support for their previous ATI TV tuner cards for Windows 7, so when I built up my new AMD x6 system for Windows 7 I went with a Happauge WinTV PCIx card this time since they have full support for Windows 7 (32bit and 64bit) as well as Windows XP. They also seem to only have directshow video capture drivers, which I have successfully used in VirtualDub. The system is fast enough to do realtime capture in Vdub with xvid+mp3 encoding and de-interlacing, but I haven't found a realtime MPEG-2 encoder that would work so far.

I just tried under Windows 7x64 with the WinTV card, ffmpeg -r 29.97 -f vfwcap -i list
and got a similar result as you:
[vfwcap @ 01b64240] Driver 0
[vfwcap @ 01b64240] Microsoft WDM Image Capture (Win32)
[vfwcap @ 01b64240] Version: 6.1.7601.17514

WDM is the directshow driver only as expected.
Reading the info on video capture drivers under VirtualDub's help, apparently newer video capture devices (like the WinTV card I have now) have integrated audio capture and only the WDM/directshow drivers support that. The old VFW capture interface apparently only supported audio capture from a separate sound card along with the video capture. That was the way the older ATI TV tuner cards worked I recall and I had to route analog audio out from the TV tuner card to a line or aux audio input of the separate sound card.

Virtualdub finally added WDM/directshow video+audio capture support some years back. Wish ffmpeg would do that as well, since VFW has been pretty much obsolete for about 10 years (since Windows 2000 came out according to the VirtualDub help info)

[Chris K]

I just found this...

http://ffmpeg.zeranoe.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=27

It's very hot news (well May 23, 2011) about FFmpeg dshow capture but I don't know what it's worth yet.

[NighthawkGuy]

Very interesting.
Any links to ffmpeg builds with dshow vidcap support to try?

[Chris K]

The latest Zeranoe static build has it (did a binary search in it).

http://ffmpeg.zeranoe.com/builds/

The latest Sherpya and Paehl builds don't have it yet.

[NighthawkGuy]

Yeah I just tried the latest Zeranoe static build and it accepts the -f dshow parameter which the Sherpya build didn't.
However even with the proper video capture driver name string, it just crashes immediately - so it needs some more work apparently.

[Chris K]

I don't know if you did, but I think the same as for the vfwcap goes up here. You have to set a channel etc. with another app.

I'm not able to check things out currently. I have a capture card (Pinnacle AV/DV) not a TV card and I have to setup a input for it and it's getting late here . Probably tomorrow.

[NighthawkGuy]

I don't know if you did, but I think the same as for the vfwcap goes up here. You have to set a channel etc. with another app.

Yeah I just used VirtualDub's capture to setup video source and TV channel, etc.
But ffmpeg still crashed anyway with the -f dshow parameter and the video driver string.

[eyework]

Forgive me for asking a very basic beginner question, but I would like to see the actual command line parameters that the AVANTI program is using. I've pressed Ctrl+S to show the command window, but that only shows the results of the command being run. I'd like to see something along these lines:

ffmpeg.exe -i "C:\test1.avi" -y -vcodec mpeg4 -b 780k -acodec libmp3lame -ar 44100 -ab 128k -s 640x480 "C:\test2.mp4"

Is this something that AVANTI can do? Show me the command that it executed based on the GUI settings that I set? I genuinely appreciate any help you guys can send my way. I've already tried googling and searching this forum, but couldn't find anything.

[Chris K]

If you right-click on the "User VIDEO options" command line, you'll get a menu with the options to show and save the command line. Avanti creates command lines on the fly when you press "Start Process". So to make the command line available, shortly start and cancel the process. If there isn't a command line available yet, the options at the menu are grayed-out.

[eyework]

AWESOME! I right clicked on the User Video options text box and viola, there it was! Thank you SO much! I am donating right now via your webpage. I can't give much, but will give what I can to show my appreciation!

[Chris K]

Nice, thanks

Perhaps of help to mention that Avanti offers context sensitive help. E.g. click on the codec or denoise field and press <F1> for relevant details. Also works for selected pages and opened sub-windows.

[NighthawkGuy]

I was trying some of the avanti ffmpeg NTSC templates, and noted some issues with some of them:
NTSC_MPEG2_CQ_ES_HQ.tpl frame size set for 720x576 (should be 720x480 for NTSC)

The 23.976fps NTSC templates are set for gop=15, but I found after the pulldown process afterwards, the gop length will increase and be too large for DVD standard and wasn't accepted by DVD authoring software. gop=12 (-g 12) is better for the 23.976fps templates to solve that issue.

gop=15 is fine for the 29.97fps templates.

[Chris K]

I was trying some of the avanti ffmpeg NTSC templates, and noted some issues with some of them: ...

Thank you for reporting and advice! You probably noticed that I'm in a PAL country so I could only do basic tests on NTSC conversion. You know, just playing on my computer and checking out with MediaInfo.

I will revise all NTSC templates for the next version according to your advice.

Recently FFmpeg libavfilter added the MPlayer/MEncoder filters with the -vf mp=xxxx command. This seems to only be a interim command and they plan to modify each command to a FFmpeg dedicated version. AFAIK Mencoder can do soft flag pulldown on the fly but I couldn't get that to work yet. A number of other things however are fully functional, like delogo and rotate. Perhaps something to look at!?

http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/libavfilter.html

Avanti uses the -vf command internally and on the "User VIDEO options" command line you need to use the -vfin, -vfout or -vfuser commands. Details are in the chm help.

[highend]

It isn't possible to invoke Avanti-gui.exe with parameters like "source1", "source2", "destination" and the template that should be loaded, right?

[Chris K]

It isn't possible to invoke Avanti-gui.exe with parameters like "source1", "source2", "destination" and the template that should be loaded, right?

No currently not!

Can you explain what you would expect after launching. E.g. running the process automatically and exit when finished?

[highend]

Can you explain what you would expect after launching. E.g. running the process automatically and exit when finished?

If this would be possible (after providing all parameters to let Avanti do it's work automatically)? Appreciated

I set up quite a few computers every month. One of the best video converters is ffmpeg and the best graphical ui for it is Avanti.

Unfortunately most of my clients are a bit older (50+) and aren't computer experts so using ffmpeg directly isn't an option. Even Avanti is too
difficult for most of them

Beeing able to click on a video file and use the send to menu (I'm customizing these for each client) or a single click of a button inside XYplorer
(a great scriptable file manager software) would allow them to let Avanti do it's work (in a nice graphical way) without any hassle.

I'd love to see command line support for it

[Chris K]

When I try to evaluate it a bit, the user could click on anything unsupported by FFmpeg. The output would always be one format as given by the chosen template.

I'll take a look at it but can't promise anything yet.

[highend]

The output would always be one format as given by the chosen template.

That would be ok.

To let the user make any final changes before Avanti starts the conversion you could probably support an additional cli parameter like "/autostart"

If it is omitted Avanti would only process the parsed cli parameters but wait for the user to click "Start process".

If you like to discuss anything further or want someone to test these kind of changes, drop me a pm, I'd be your happy beta tester xD

[Chris K]

Avanti runs on the Gui4Cli script interpreter and I first have to find out if it allows me to parse command line arguments.

Give me some time and I'll let you know.

[NighthawkGuy]

Today I tried with avanti 0.5.9, the ffmbc v0.5 win32 downloaded from here: https://www.videohelp.com/tools/ffmbc
This resolved an issue I noticed with all the standard ffmpeg build for MPEG-2 output video using B-frames for DVD format, where they would always make the first GOP open (like the rest).

Apparently for DVD standard, with the MPEG-2 video with B-frames the first GOP is supposed to be closed, with all the rest of the GOPs open. An MPEG2 validator utility would flag it as non-compliant if not so. I've seen it correctly formatted with other MPEG2 videos created from other applications. I noted an error message that the mkvmerge utility would display using an MPEG2 video input file with an open first GOP. It didn't get that error message if the first GOP is closed and the rest open however.

I happened to notice that in FFmbc's changelog starting with v0.3 they added this:
"Set closed gop flag for first gop when encoding with b frames."
Which is exactly what I was looking for! Wish there was a command line flag parameter to control that feature though, should be in regular ffmpeg builds too.

Anyway ffmbc 0.5 worked fine for this with avanti and mpeg-2 video output for DVD format along with ac3 audio. So it appears ffmbc is preferable for full DVD compliant MPEG-2 video output conversion over standard ffmpeg builds.

[Chris K]

Wish there was a command line flag parameter to control that feature though, should be in regular ffmpeg builds too.

Perhaps it will in the future. Baptiste Coudurier of FFmbc also contributed to FFmpeg in the past. You could ask for it at the ffmpeg-user list if others not already did.

http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/contact.html

[Chris K]

Hi to all,

I have always tried to keep up Avanti with the latest FFmpeg win32 builds.
Recently the popular builds of Gianluigi Tiesi (Sherpya) and Dirk Paehl
appear to show no console display at all and do not allow to interrupt
the FFmpeg encode process (also when used from the cli).

If this behaviour is due to official changes in the FFmpeg source code
and if I can't get info on this (which I tried to no avail), I'm not able
to keep Avanti up-to-date.

Also at beta tests of a feature addition, done by a friendly Windows 7 x64
user, Avanti showed very unpredictable behaviour.

Avanti is a 32-bit application, developped and tested only on Windows XP
and W2K (32-bit). I'm not able to update the Avanti dependencies and
develop environment and Avanti may soon be considered as outdated.

Avanti version 0.5.9 will for the present be the last release.

Chris

[NighthawkGuy]

Recently the popular builds of Gianluigi Tiesi (Sherpya) and Dirk Paehl
appear to show no console display at all and do not allow to interrupt
the FFmpeg encode process (also when used from the cli).

At what version did that start of those builds? The recent Sherpya build (FFmpeg-git-N-30172-g3c20c0e.7z) I used with avanti was from about a month ago and works fine, even with improved faster MPEG-2 encoding speed.
Though now I've switched to the ffmbc v0.5 that has better DVD compatability, though its slower in MPEG-2 encoding, perhaps from older code.

[Chris K]

At what version did that start of those builds? The recent Sherpya build (FFmpeg-git-N-30172-g3c20c0e.7z) I used with avanti was from about a month ago and works fine, even with improved faster MPEG-2 encoding speed.

For the Sherpya builds it started with git-N-30656-g23a29a3 but what worries me is that there are already four builds released with this behaviour by Dirk Paehl. That's what made me think it's a change in the FFmpeg source code. I played around with the -loglevel command but couldn't get back console display.

Though now I've switched to the ffmbc v0.5 that has better DVD compatability, though its slower in MPEG-2 encoding, perhaps from older code.

FFmbc has great enhancements but the problem is that the FFmpeg revision it's based on is only periodically updated. A few things I know about the currently used FFmpeg code for FFmbc 0.6, is that it has a broken wtv demuxer and metadata muxer. These things are in the mean time fixed in the current FFmpeg revisions.

[tigerb]

I spent about 30 mins reading up about this new found tool and correctly put ffmpeg.exe in the correct folder and bingo, it's running.

I'm just wondering if most of these ffmpeg GUI tools are meant for "Quick" conversions rather than "Quality" conversions?, cause the presets are mostly for tiny videos 4:3/320x240 etc.

I would assume for beginners like myself, it's always the same question "I want to convert this video file, what's the best settings to at least maintain the same quality?".....

I loaded a test video with the followings (see attached), and I couldn't find anythings that close to it's quality from the presets? (or am I missing something?)....

Is there any presets in Avanti that will convert the video to at least the same quality/or best possible quality or from the pix attached, what's the best settings to use? (prefer mp4/H264/mp3/ac3/aac and trying to get rids of WMV/WMA).

Thanks.

[Chris K]

Is there any presets in Avanti that will convert the video to at least the same quality/or best possible quality or from the pix attached, what's the best settings to use? (prefer mp4/H264/mp3/ac3/aac and trying to get rids of WMV/WMA).

Avanti is meant as a GUI for FFmpeg users, to simplify the use of the CLI. It is not promoted as a all-in-one video converter (using FFmpeg in the background). The included templates are examples to be used as a start point but mostly need modification for the users specific needs.

I would look at the tools section to find a more suitable converter for your needs. Many offer a wide range of profiles for all kind of devices and quality levels.

[NighthawkGuy]

I've found in my own use of avanti/ffmpeg its best for video conversions for DVD (using MPEG-2 video and AC3 audio) from a variety of input sources including youtube/flv format.
For h264 video the freeware x264 converter I've found is more advanced and much faster than ffmpeg. I use that for video conversions meant for blu-ray or a general media player.
avanti/ffmpeg is good also for quick general audio conversions like aac->ac3, etc.
avanti also has some excellent built-in tools for fast mpeg-2 video restreaming which I use to correct incorrectly flagged mpeg-2 video captures from WinTV TV tuner cards - they flag the video stream as interlaced bottom-field-first but its actually top-field-first.