How do I encode using Avisynth and x264

[Placebo]

I'm new to video conversions... and I still want to learn more about them.
I am familiar with avidemux , handbrake , winff , little bit of ffmpeg
I hear a lot about AVISYNTH on this forum .. so what exactly is avisynth ?
I also saw somewhere , a user mentioned some video that he converted using avisynth and x264
Alright I know what x264.exe is. I also have the 64bit x264.exe and avisynth installed .. which I had to install with RipBot.

I normally convert 1280x720 videos to 848x480 using handbrake to view on my ipod touch .. So exactly how do I achieve this conversion

[Anonymous344]

AviSynth is a frameserver. You write a script pointing to your video and send that to the encoder, in this case x264. (If you need to process the video, you can do that in the script too.) Then you either open the script in a GUI, e.g. MeGUI, or use the command line. It sounds as if the user you had in mind did the latter: if you want to do this too, you might find this thread useful.

[hech54]

Just use HandBrake.

[_Al_]

Some applications or even video players would load avisynth script as if it was video, because Avisynth works in the background so that loading application thinks it is just uncompressed video.
There is a command for loading video, there are commands for resizing, etc., etc., tons of plugins that do something to video, that is why Avisynth is being used, because you can apply a filter to the video (effect of some sort) by just adding particular line in the script

[manono]

I normally convert 1280x720 videos to 848x480 using handbrake to view on my ipod touch .. So exactly how do I achieve this conversion

You don't, as Handbrake doesn't accept AviSynth input. Other programs (almost all others) will accept Avisynth input and many can also export iPod-compatible videos. XviD4PSP, for example.

[hello_hello]

Try MeGUI. More of a learning curve than handbrake but it's a way to introduce yourself to Avisynth. Avisynth is a frame server. It "serves" the video to another application or encoder etc. If you use the File/Open menu to open a video for encoding MeGUI will offer to index it. Add the indexing job to the queue and run it and the script creator will open with a preview. The script creator lets you do all the normal things (cropping and resizing etc) as you normally would, and it creates the script for you which it then uses to encode the video via Avisynth. Once you get the hang of how it works, MeGUI makes it fairly easy to modify scripts yourself so you can start experimenting with Avisynth.

MeGUI will encode Avisynth scripts using either the x264 encoder (same as Handbrake) or the older Xvid encoder. It comes with it's own portable version of Avisynth but if you want to be able to open scripts and view them with a player such as MPC-HC, you'll need to install the "normal" version of Avisynth.