Any way to insert 1 frame image at the beginning of an mp4 (using AutoGK)

[cryptyk]

I'm happily using AutoGK to convert my DVDs to Xvid. The device I use to watch the movies, though, shows the folder with all of the videos with thumbnails. The thumbnail is the first frame of the video, which for all of my movies, is a black screen.
Is there any way to insert an image into the first frame of either the first vob, or into the resulting avi file so I can put some fancy thumbnails in there?

[redwudz]

Not sure about AutoGK, but I have done that with VirtualDub by grabbing a frame of video, then pasting it to the beginning of the video, then save it as a direct stream copy. You will just see a brief flash when it plays back, but it should show up in Explorer as a thumbnail of the frame. You would do this after encoding with AutoGK.

And welcome to our forums.

[cryptyk]

Wow. That was fast =)

I'll take a look at the VirtualDub guides to see if I can figure that out. Thanks so much!

-c

[cryptyk]

Awesome - I got it!

Thanks so much for your help.

Only remaining issue is that I have to do this on keyframes, but I can live with that...

[redwudz]

Your video should start on a keyframe, so adding another one in front of that shouldn't be a problem. Virtualdub can skip to keyframes either by using the keyboard or using the yellow keyframe icon. If you aren't familiar with VD, well worth learning for AVI type files. It can edit, filter, capture, frameserve and do a few dozen other useful things. And many guides available. I sometimes add a black frame along with the new image frame to make the transition to playback a little less glaring.

BTW, you may have noticed, highly compressed formats like Xvid or Divx have keyframes set every 300 or so frames by default, so that's one reason they are difficult to edit. That's also one way they achieve higher compression. VD will tell you how many keyframes (I frames) you have in your video in the 'File>File Information' window.

[cryptyk]

The insertion at frame 0 isn't a problem. It's the grabbing the frame to insert that is what's killin me.

I'm trying to grab the frame that shows the title of the movie. Let's say I have

0k
1
2
3
4
5
6k

and the frame I want to insert at the beginning is frame 3. What I'm doing is opening the original, putting it in stream copying mode and navigating to frame 3. StartSel, EndSel, Save to avi and I get a new AVI file with:
0k
1
2
3

It looks like I can't start my new AVI anywhere but a keyframe. Then I'm opening my new AVI and appending the original. This works, but the limitation is that the frame I'm inserting in the beginning needs to be right after a keyframe in the original AVI file.

The other thing I tried was grabbing the insertion AVI in Full Processing Mode, which lets me grab just the frame I want and create a new AVI with it. I can't figure out how to get the recompression of the insertion AVI to match perfectly with the original though. And I can't do the append AVI unless they both match perfectly. The error I keep getting on the append is: Compression formats don't match. Mismatch in opaque block at byte 14. (or something really similar to that)

Is there a neat-o trick that I'm missing here?

[poisondeathray]

There might be an easier way, but I can share how I did this on XP (not sure if it will work on Vista)

1) Demux the audio into a separate mp3 (you can use yamb or avidemux)

2) Save a copy of the video with no audio, using vdub (specify no audio)

3) The smart rendering feature of vdub is not as good as avidemux's. It will rencode that 1 frame with frame accuracy even if not on a keyframe, but vdubs' is still buggy and won't give you the desired result (at least for me it didn't using 1.8.1). You can select the "title screen" frame using the mark in/mark out feature, select no audio, copy for video, format avi. Press save with extension (e.g. "title.avi")

3) Open the "title.avi" and append the audioless copy in vdub

4) Specify audio from other file, point to the demuxed audio

5) Direct Stream copy for both audio & video

The audio will be exactly 1 frame off. If you want can fix this with interleave, but I just tried this with a XviD TV episode, and you can't tell the difference. The only re-encoding is of the "title screen" from avidemux's smart copy, the whole process should take a few minutes, the rest is stream copied.

Cheers

[jagabo]

The insertion at frame 0 isn't a problem. It's the grabbing the frame to insert that is what's killin me.

I'm trying to grab the frame that shows the title of the movie. Let's say I have

0k
1
2
3
4
5
6k

and the frame I want to insert at the beginning is frame 3. What I'm doing is opening the original, putting it in stream copying mode and navigating to frame 3. StartSel, EndSel, Save to avi and I get a new AVI file with:
0k
1
2
3

It looks like I can't start my new AVI anywhere but a keyframe. Then I'm opening my new AVI and appending the original. This works, but the limitation is that the frame I'm inserting in the beginning needs to be right after a keyframe in the original AVI file.

Try this:

1) Video -> Fast Recompress
2) Video -> Smart Rendering
3) Video -> Compression... select Xvid, Target Quantizer mode, Q=3 (or whatever)
4) Go to frame 3, StartSel
5) Go to frame 4, End Sel
6) Edit -> Copy
7) Edit -> Clear Selection
8) Go to Frame 0, Edit -> Paste
9) File -> Save as AVI

Frame 3 will be reencoded as a keyframe at the start of the video, the rest of the video will be Direct Stream Copied.

[poisondeathray]

jagabo - when I tried your steps, (I added a step #10 to change back to direct stream copy - not sure if that was right or not, it didn't work with only steps 1-9 as listed), vdub still copies a few extra frames in the output file (i.e not frame accurate), although these few extra frames were not evident when previewing in vdub....weird. Or do you mean re-encode the whole video?

EDIT: NVM...user error I used DivX instead of XviD LOL... Jagabo's solution works nice & very easy!

[cryptyk]

1) Video -> Fast Recompress
2) Video -> Smart Rendering
3) Video -> Compression... select Xvid, Target Quantizer mode, Q=3 (or whatever)
4) Go to frame 3, StartSel
5) Go to frame 4, End Sel
6) Edit -> Copy
7) Edit -> Clear Selection
8) Go to Frame 0, Edit -> Paste
9) File -> Save as AVI

This worked *perfectly*. You are the man. Thank you so much.

[madmillington]

Does this work(or is there an alternative) to mp4 h264?
Vista video library is sooooo annoying, why can media portal do what vi$ta can't??
ie cover art etc etc for any video file...

[nerys]

ahh maybe this is over simplified and can not work for a reason I am not skilled enough to understand but why not just grab a "wallpaper" or "box art" image of the movie crop and size to your video resolution and insert that? will be far higher quality than a "grab" from the video anyway??