DVD flick taking a ridiculously long time to encode!

[meoklmrk91]

I am burning a video that is nearly three hours long. I expected the burning process to take a while but this is just crazy, especially as it is the audio encoding that's the issue. Video encoding took a little under three hours, audio encoding is currently at 35% after 4 and a half hours. This thing has been encoding for 7 and a half hours, something has to be wrong? I have a pretty decent PC, i5 processor 8GB of RAM.

[Kerry56]

The audio shouldn't take 5hrs. What was the original audio format?

You might want to consider switching to AVStoDVD. It is under constant development, and can make use of a slightly superior video encoder in HCenc.

[meoklmrk91]

The audio shouldn't take 5hrs. What was the original audio format?

You might want to consider switching to AVStoDVD. It is under constant development, and can make use of a slightly superior video encoder in HCenc.

Well it was an .flv file.

[meoklmrk91]

I downloaded AVStoDVD, started the project and pressed start, HCenc started up but it's doing nothing?

[Kerry56]

Flv can have lots of different audio and video codecs. The most common audio codecs in them these days are AAC and MP3. I almost never work with flv files though.

If you want to know for sure, examine the file with MediaInfo.

[Kerry56]

Did you read either of the guides for using AVStoDVD? Links to them can be found at the AVStoDVD homepage: https://sites.google.com/site/avstodvdmain/

[meoklmrk91]

Yep, have read them whilst installing and setting up, looked again to see if I could see why nothing is happening. HCenc just sits there doing nothing .

[orsetto]

Converting files to DVD with all-in-ones like DVDflick and AVStoDVD is easy, but these programs are prone to being tripped up by damaged or off-spec files. The issue with DVDflick processing a 20-minute video normally but taking five or six hours to process the audio is a common problem. I've discovered a workaround that usually helps, thanks to a somewhat related tip I received from VH member Calidore awhile ago. Bear with me, it will take some explaining:

There was a thread last year that discussed the very annoying inability of DVDflick (and other converters) to accept the audio embedded in .WMV files that use the WMA9 format. When such videos are added to a DVDflick project, an alert pops up that "Windows Media 9 Audio cannot be used, so no audio track will be imported for this file." The result is a DVD conversion of the video with no soundtrack- pretty useless. The solution proposed by Calidore was to download the Avanti GUI front end for ffmpeg. Avanti GUI is abandonware thats not completely compatible with Windows 7 and 8, I had to fudge a couple of its settings to make it work (each time it runs, Windows throws up the scary "this program wants to modify your PC" warning, just OK it). You also need to have a newer version of ffmpeg in your system, not just the old one stored in the DVDflick program folder.

With Avanti GUI installed, you run it, and tell it to strip the funky audio track from the problematic WMV video and convert it from WMA9 to something generic like WAV. This takes less than a minute. You then add the video file to DVDflick, dismissing the alert about not being able to import the audio. Highlight the video in the DVDflick project list, select "Edit title", then select "Audio tracks." Click the "Add" button, navigate to the WAV file created with Avanti GUI, and add it to the file. Close all the edit windows, and in the project list the video will now indicate "1 audio track" instead of zero audio tracks. You then proceed to author a DVD as usual.

How this applies to your FLV audio issue: on a hunch, I tried the above Avanti GUI trick that fixes audio in WMV files with some problematic MP4 and FLV files that were giving me the "5 hour audio encode" issue you're experiencing. I discovered it works: some video files apparently contain an AAC audio variation that DVDflick stalls on, but if I strip that track out with Avanti GUI and then add it back into DVDflick, it no longer stalls.

The workflow is slightly different than for the WMA9 problem. When you discover DVDflick is stalling on a particular FLV or MP4, make a note of the filename (if there is more than one in your project). Abort the authoring process and exit DVDflick. Start up Avanti GUI, load the problem FLV, and tell it to make a copy of the AAC audio track. Exit Avanti GUI, reopen your DVDflick project, and highlight the FLV in the project list. Go to "Edit title", then "Audio tracks", then click on "Add." Navigate to the new AAC you made with Avanti GUI, and add it to the FLV. You'll now see two audio tracks in the audio window: highlight the top one (the original) and remove it, leaving only the new audio you just added. Close the edit windows and click on DVDflick's "Create DVD" button. It should now process the files normally with no unusual delay.

Note that DVDflick might crash upon adding or deleting an audio track: don't worry about that. Just reboot the DVDflick project and it won't crash a second time. Also note the new audio track created by Avanti GUI may run a couple seconds longer than the video: DVDflick will try to compensate but lipsync may not be perfect. You can adjust the sync slightly by clicking the "Ignore Audio Delay" checkbox in the edit window.

The above is all more complicated to read than to do: Avanti GUI creates a new audio track for a 30 minute video in less than a minute, and it takes just seconds to add/change audio tracks in DVDflick. The lipsync issue varies from file to file: when it is really bad then I know DVDflick is unsuitable and I'll need to use a completely different set of tools to make a DVD from that file. AVStoDVD will occasionally succeed with files that mess up DVDflick, but not that often: generally if one chokes on a particular file, the other will as well. These all-in-one DVD tools expect a perfect, totally standard-spec source file: anything else confuses them. Some buggy files require the traditional DVD authoring workflow with multiple programs.

[blud7]

If you must use DVDFlick...
Demux the audio, encode it with your audio tool of choice, downmixing to stereo while you're at it.
Remux to original file. Pop it back in DVDFlick.

Avanti isn't abandonware (any more)?

Latest version:
0.7.5 (June 28, 2013)?

[meoklmrk91]

So earlier I posted on here because I was using DVD Flick to encode a .flv file and it was taking rediculously long. A poster on here kindly recommended AVS2DVD, but that wouldn't work either. I suspected that the file being .flv was the issue so I converted it to MPEG4 and from there AVS2DVD worked perfectly expect now I have been left with seriously bloated file that will not fit onto a standard DVD. So I then downloaded DVDShrinker, it shrunk the .iso but will not shrink the .mds which is what I need for imgburner.

Any help woyld be much appreciated here guys, this isn't my area of expertise but I seriously did not expect to come up against all the crap, I have been trying to burn this damn thing literally all day. imgburner will not let me use the .iso file, it says that I should have used the .mds file and uses that instead.

[Kerry56]

AVStoDVD should have made a dvd that would fit either a DVD-5 or a DVD-9 depending on which size you specified. Did you check the size before running it through DVDShrink? Default output is to a DVD-5 single layer dvd.

And AVStoDVD can output straight to an ISO file if that is what you want. You'd need ImgBurn installed to do that.

Try burning the dvd-video output from AVStoDVD straight to a blank dvd using ImgBurn in Build Mode. Here is a guide for doing just that if you need one: http://forum.imgburn.com/index.php?showtopic=4632

[theewizard]

you only need MDS for a 'dual layer' dvd-9 disc

once you used dvd shrink, you burn thr NEW iso with imgburn

i don't see the video lenght/run time mentioned

if its over 120 min, is the most likely reason you got a large file and need the MDS

set avs2dvd for dvd-5 single processing will create a higher quality than shrinking the dvd-9

encoding only once to dvd-5 is better than encoding twice

[hech54]

So earlier I posted on here because I was using DVD Flick to encode a .flv file and it was taking rediculously long. A poster on here kindly recommended AVS2DVD, but that wouldn't work either.

FLV is notorious CRAP. Lesson learned.

[theewizard]

i've had more trouble with mkv, than i have with flv

but this 'off topic' approach will Not help the OP solve his problem

when i have a problem flv
i use avidemux to create separate audio and video tracks, and load those into avs2dvd

you can save the video to AVI just 'copy' the video stream no recode
save the audio, change it to ac3, mp3, acc during the process

then load both video and audio track into avs2dvd