Wavi.exe stopped working

[jcknecht]

Hi everyone!

I'm a newbie to this kinda thing but I downloaded this awesome BDRebuilder program to backup our bluray discs (I have 4 children and am soon considering just a media player for mkv. files) nonetheless we are wanting to back up the BD. SO! I have backed up two movies, How to Train Your Dragon and Gladiator, but both had crazy pauses that made the disc jump back to a previous place in the movie several times. I then downloaded the inspect application and ran it. It found one of my settings was off so I was excited to run it again today once it had been setup properly. I even took another suggestion and bought a rewriteable disc, just in case. So I opened BDRebuilder today and started it on The Other Guys. A few minutes into the movie an error message that said that the Wavi.exe file had stopped working and BDRebuilder had stopped working as well. Once I clicked OK on the message report, BDRebuilder started working again but I stopped it since I'm not sure what I am going to wind up with if that file stops working. Could you help me figure this out?

Thanks,
Chris

[fritzi93]

Welcome to the forum, Chris.

Okay, first things first. Pauses and jumps are almost always a media problem. The usual advice here is to use Taiyo-Yuden (available online only) or Verbatim (but not the Value-Line series, or whatever it's called, I forget). Perhaps just as important, you should use only ImgBurn for burning video, whether DVD-Video, AVCHD, or BD. If you're using crummy discs, try burning at 8x with ImgBurn and see if that helps.

I'm assuming you're backing up to BD 5/9 (DVDR) and not BD25. If the latter, just set BDRB to *not* re-encode the audio and your problem being solved, you don't need to read any further.

Okay, on to the wavi.exe error. This is an audio error. There have been sporadic reports on that subject lately on the BDRB bug report thread. The author maintains that it's probably caused by a bad rip, pre-processing, or filtering. Which may well be true. However, I came across that error myself last week and have concluded that's not necessarily the case.

The disc in question is 3:10 to Yuma. I had done this disc successfully with BDRB to BD5, oh, perhaps two years ago, one of the first ones I ever did with BDRB, using one of the earliest versions of BDRB. So I watched it last week and concluded the bitrate is too low (the movie is over 2 hrs and the bitrate of the BD5 re-encode is well below 4,500 kbps). So I pulled out the original disc and ripped it to redo it to BD9. That's when I got the error. Twice. BDRB errored out with the lpcm English track, then again with the AC3 EX track. A new rip (with AnyDVDHD) didn't fix the problem.

So what can one conclude from this?

1) Well, the obvious: BDRB is still beta and one thing gets fixed, then another breaks. After all, I had done this disc before, and the only times it had been out of the case was to rip it.

2) You may not like to hear this, but lots of times something is not quite right with BD audio tracks. There may be sync discontinuities, sync byte missing, clipping detected, any number of things. I say this because that's what EAC3to tells me about the problematic audio tracks when I try to correct the problems. BDRB may or may not choke on iffy audio, I have dealt with this numerous times. I wonder sometimes if this is not deliberate on the part of the studios, i.e. make it playable on a standalone but difficult to re-process.

3) Your settings for the helper apps (Avisynth, ffdshow, and Haali) may be wrong, or you may have wrong versions. Use only the versions recommended by jdobbs, available on the first page of the author site. And run inspect.exe from the BDRB folder to confirm your settings. You're certain everything is okay there?

What I have found fixes the problem without fail (assuming all settings are correct) is Clown_BD, (an EAC3to front-end). You can extract the main movie and correct the audio at the same time. If Clown_BD successfully completes, BDRB *will* be able to handle the extracted file. And that's what I did with 3:10 to Yuma.

Mind you, if you're one of those folks who insist on keeping the menus, the above isn't your solution. You could use Clown_BD BD Copier, which extracts main menu and movie. Or try AVCHDCoder. Or try a different version of BDRB. The trouble with the last option is that older versions expire, so maybe jdobbs will fix the wavi.exe error in a future version.

Good luck.

[jcknecht]

Thanks so much for the reply! and here goes the response

I did read about the quality of the media and since reading that post have since ordered some nice Verbatim discs to burn to instead. And I just downloaded inspect.exe not more than 2 days ago, ran it, fixed the errors, and ran it again to make sure I fixed it right so I think that everything is going well on that front

I totally understand the beta thing! I really like the program...I just need to get the kinks out of my workflow I do have a few quick questions for you though since I can't seem to figure them out on my own and you'll probably think I'm totally mindless but...

"If you're using crummy discs, try burning at 8x with ImgBurn and see if that helps.

I'm assuming you're backing up to BD 5/9 (DVDR) and not BD25. If the latter, just set BDRB to *not* re-encode the audio and your problem being solved, you don't need to read any further."

I am using BD25 so how do I set BDRB to not re-encode the audio and if I still want to try to get some use out of the crummy discs...how do I set Imgburn to 8x for them?

Thanks again for all the great info!
Chris

I went and downloaded the Clown_BD program to try on that movie instead of AnyDVD HD that I originally used on it.

[fritzi93]

Okay, you're using BD25.

Go to Settings -> Setup -> Audio Encoding Options. Tick the first, second and last boxes so BDRB never re-encodes the audio. (Keep only one English audio track and one English subtitle track to save space and maintain quality.) Then try again and see if that fixes the problem.

Try burning at less than the rated maximum speed using ImgBurn only.

Clown_BD is not a decrypter, so you either have to rip the full disc first or have a driver-level decrypter running in the background (like AnyDVDHD or DVDFabPasskey).

[EDIT] I should add that if you have to resort to Clown_BD, you need to convert the audio to AC3 640 kbps. Keeping it "as is" does not correct problems with the audio.

[fritzi93]

A couple more things to do if you *still* get the wavi.exe error when encoding to BD25:

1) Uninstall ffdshow and haali, run a registry cleaner like CCleaner. Got to the Haali folder in Programs and delete it. Reboot, re-install. And I sincerely hope you don't have a codec pack on your machine.

2) In ffdshow audio decoder configuration, under Codecs, scroll down to "Uncompressed" and set it to "All Supported" if it isn't already.

Then if you still get the error, extract movie-only with Clown_BD, converting audio to AC3 640 kbps.

[jcknecht]

Thanks for helping me with the setup in BDRB.

I don't have a codec pack I just installed whatever jdobbs said to for my setup to work with Vista, ie. Haali, ffdshow, etc. where he takes you step by step to install and setup everything so my audio configuration is already set to "all supported" and after I try that movie again I will see if I need to uninstall, cleanup, and then reinstall those programs.

I'm running it right now so I should have something to show for it later today! I'll let you know what worked for me.

Thanks again!

[jcknecht]

so changing the setting on BDRB helped me get past the wavi.exe not working - so that got fixed. I tried burning with the crappy discs at 8x but that didn't do too much good except make the loop slightly smaller in the movie itself. So I got the verbatim LTH discs that I bought and evidently these aren't as good as I should have bought because they still had a small loop in them when finished burning. *SIGH* SO...I think I am going to go buy some higher speed Verbatim BD to see what works.

[jcknecht]

also, where is the best site to buy the taiyo-yuden bd from?

[fritzi93]

When I suggested 8x, I was still under the impression you were backing up to DVDR, not BD25. ImgBurn can tell you the rated speeds of your media, try slowest *rated* speed and use verification.

You should check on the firmware of your drive with ImgBurn. Mode -> Discovery. Tools -> Drive -> Check for firmware updates. Let it find a firmware update for you. You might need to know the manufacturer of the drive, but it will probably find one for you automatically. That just may solve the problem with your burned discs. LTH discs are not well-proven as of yet and I should think that without a firmware update you'll have failure after failure. It helps to have a current write strategy for newly-introduced discs in particular.

You can also set a custom output size in BDRB. Mind you I dunno about BD media, but it often helps with crummy DVDRs to set a smaller output size to stay well clear of the edge of the disc, which is where problems are more common. I don't really have much hope that will fix it as jdobbs allows a fair amount of overhead for output, but you could try.

Are you first testing the output with a software player, or are you just burning to disc and testing on a standalone? It would help to know that your output is definitely okay. Which leads to:

A long shot, but are you rendering to a separate hard drive? If you're ripping/encoding to the same drive that your operating system is on, you could have severe fragmenting of files.

Good luck.

[EDIT] A site sponsor is Supermediastore, you can get discs from them. There's also Meritline (which I've been using), Amazon and Rima.

[jcknecht]

I did download an update to the firmware and will test that out tonight. I render to my expansion drive so as not to have anything extra working on my internal drive.

I will try it out on a software player first...I don't know why I didn't think of that first! Thanks for the suggestion! I'll let you know what happens with the firmware update and the software testing

[jcknecht]

Okay, so I thought I'd try looking up how to just play the ready-to-rip files on my computer with Cyberlink but I can't figure it out Could you tell me how to do this? or show me where the guide is?

Oh, and I decided to go with a movie only rip for some of the smaller movies that are as cool as Gladiator.

[fritzi93]

Ready to rip? Don't you mean ready to burn?

Cyberlink? IIRC, you just point PowerDVD at the folder produced by BDRB. I have a PowerDVD 8 install disc somewhere, but have been using Digital Theater in TME, it's much better.

You can also use MPCHC or Splash (both free), if you bore down through the directories to the Stream folder and play individual *.m2ts files.

So, what model is your standalone Blu-Ray player? Anything fairly recent should play burnt BD25s with no problem, but it wouldn't hurt to poke around to see if it has any issues.

[EDIT] If you can, try the discs on another player.