Nice one as always Jan. Mind if I chime in? Did a side by side comparison of a quality .AVI file. (52minutes, 800mb's) XP pro sp3. P4 3.2 GHz (northwood single core) Using highest priority. Avidemux v's ConvertXtoDVD 3 (freeware v's payware) Using the same .avi file: 1. Avidemux took 47.17 minutes for pass one. 2. Avidemux took 43.27 for pass two Outcome= as Varnull posts. Not distinguishable visually. As far as ac/3 sound goes....only a "Maidens hair breath" away from synching fully. Again the same .avi file: 1. ConvertXtoDVD took 39.09 minutes and added a menu by "default"......ooops. 2. No second pass here. The darkest area's show mild pixelation. Audio ac/3 exhibits the same out of sync characteristics. In my first use of this convert X app, I combined three .AVI files and rendered menu's. The darker area's showed horrendous pixelation. Audio was out by the same amount as the trials above. If Avidemux can join .AVI files and render menu's for free...then no contest at all.
Avidemux isn't a dvd authoring application.. It doesn't do menus or ifos vobs and disk structure...it's a video file editor and format shifter. Join/split/drop bad frames.. frame by frame edit.. replace audio.. remaster camcorder footage.. all that kind of stuff.. It's really a powerful video editing suite hiding behind a simple interface.. It's one of an arsenal of FOSS tools to manipulate av content, not a "one click does everything (usually badly)" n00b tool for no brain people.. Practice and care will produce excellent quality files ready for authoring to dvd format, or your ipod or mp4 player.. or whatever you want to do with them. You can even rip mp3 (or any supported audio format) audio from any video file......
Thats not very nice. I thought a forum was suppose help people. If you could tell me what is wrong with what Im asking then I wont have to be ignorant on the subject.
If you had READ my last post you would have seen that you can do anything you want with the resulting file.. in whatever format you have converted it to... Avidemux is a bit of a Swiss Army Knife application.. It does many many things. Drag and drop.. sorry.. I don't know that term. Does that have something to do with disney channel no brain required (or wanted) windows?? I only took the time and trouble to write the guide in the first place to help somebody out who was having trouble making mpeg2/ac3 files with this app. I don't normally bother because reading the wiki or looking and thinking is usually adequate to get a good result, but the avidemux documentation is a little sketchy. FOSS users stock answer.. RTFM
Eric, just burn the output files with whatever burning software you have and all should go well. Often such basic questions like "what happens if I press this button?" will be met with either silence or something you didn't expect. Please press the metaphorical button......how else would you find out? If you run into trouble, then ask. It seems Varnull beat me to your reply. Lucky for both she has her claws retracted... rofl.
2 people who haven't read my posts now IT DOESN'T MAKE A DVD IMAGE... you need something like dvdauthor to make vobs and ifo's and the rest of the crap that a dvd disk needs. avidemux is a TRANSCODING application (if you want technical.. it's a GUI frontend for FFMPEG).. simple as.
Hi Varnull, haven't looked at this program in over a year - Your quick and dirty guide seems helpful so I gave it ago. Yhe only thing I noticed that seems out of the ordinary is that the bitrate control in the 2-pass encode didn't seemed to do anything. Even though I set average ~5Mbps, the finished MPG only averaged ~2Mbps. Curiously enough, it looked pretty good in spite of that.
TBH.. mine seems to work fine. May be a quirk of the windows version. Anyway.. in my books high bitrate isn't the only determining factor for quality. I just go off how the original looks to my eyes compared to the input file. The setting will be in the quantizer if you want to play about with it. It's pretty endlessly configurable, but I just go with what seem like sensible defaults unless I'm crunching on my cluster when I use command line transcode and ffmpeg instead.. It's only an out of the box app if you want it to be.
Could be ... I only started looking at it yesterday. I'll read up in their own forums and see if I can find anything. At first glance though, it's not as stable as Virtualdub. It actually crashed on me a couple of times when I was configuring the mpeg options. I see the source is available for compiling on your own machine. Perhaps I'll give that a try.
Never crashed on me.. Probably the difference with using the stable OS is was really designed for instead of a port. As I think I said, this isn't my main use for it. I normally fire it up to work with home movies and weddings and cine/vhs conversions rather than things which are already in high bitrate dvd format. It's only a pretty skin for ffmpeg, which I often run from the command line as it is possible to do way more with weird files that way. I don't know about the windows version at all.. but the linux one can be built/configured to use other tools.. like mencoder (which isn't as good as ffmpeg) No point comparing it to virtualdub and things like that with me.. I don't use them.. they don't exist in my FOSS world
