HOWTO: Install and use the latest FFmpeg and x264

[abominable]

@FakeOutdoorsman A great thanx for your info !! Now I've got to learn how to use audacity. Hehehehe...

[FakeOutdoorsman]

@FakeOutdoorsman A great thanx for your info !! Now I've got to learn how to use audacity. Hehehehe...

I'm glad it was useful to you. I'm planning on finishing a few other FFmpeg related guides, but I've been saying that for a while now. Too many late nights at working hogging my day.

[sumero]

when you do ffmpeg -i video.mov
it shows Duration = 00:22:54.13

the question is, how does ffmpeg get that duration
if it has not played the video entirely.

( how does it know? )

is that duration saved somewhere in the metadata of a video
or what?

sumero

[sumero]

i just reported a bug on ffmpeg.


https://roundup.ffmpeg.org/roundup/ffmpeg/issue1496

my first bug post, i wonder if they'll even consider it

this is not a rare situation, it is the most basic thing one
can do, and most common thing one can do. so it's not an "exotic case"

because i've been testing it in the past 2 weeks

trust me something is sooo wrong.. i know not everyone can test
this bug because you do not have an imac with quicktime pro...

but if you do, go ahead, download any movie trailer from apple.com/trailers
and then get rid of the front and back of it a little bit.

hey maybe you can test this with other stuff too, if you have a quicktime
on windows or something or whatever, just trim a video from apple.com/trailers
and test it please.

get rid of those logos that show up in the beginning of the video
and the text that shows up at the end of the video. by selecting the
middle and then doing a "TRIM TO SELECTION" with quicktime.

and then run a simple ffmpeg -i video.mov video.mp4

everything is out of sync, everything is sooo wrong
strange frozen frame in the beginning, audio is somewhere else..

i can not use async because #1, it is pointless because all i extract
is the video, not the audio. and even the video is acting strange.

if you do "ffmpeg -i video.mov" to see the duration about the video
it will give you the duration for the ORIGINAL movie trailer, in other words
the duration will be incorrect.

and then you can do "ffmpeg -i video.mov video.mp4" you get that
"time = 00:01:08 " now you think you got the correct video duration
but guess what.. while this is the correct duration, if you play the video.mp4
( the output ) you will notice it is longer than that duration reported at
the end of the conversion.

so we are all using a buggy FFMPEG and no-one even seems to care.

at first i thought maybe APPLE did something to QUICKTIME and
ffmpeg was unable to read it properly anymore.

but then i tested this same video with mplayer's OLDER versions
( the one on ubuntu by default for example ). no syncing issues at all.
no video issues at all.

BUT THIS OF COURSE COMES AT A TERRIBLE PRICE. video quality
was very bad. in other words MPLAYER/FFMPEG used to NOT have
this issue, but now they do, so they obviously screwed up as they
upgraded. what happened? i don't know...

it's almost as if they changed their entire ENGINE or something.

oh based on my tests, it seems to me like mplayer,ffmpeg are using
exact same stuff.

oh yeh let me ELABORATE..

if you do ffmpeg -i video.mov video.yuv
and then ffmpeg -i video.mov video.mp4

at the end of the conversion you will see "time=" has changed, for .yuv
it is a lot longer... STRANGE, VERY STRANGE, makes no sense at all.


sumero

[andrew.46]

Hi FakeOutdoorsman,

I was wondering when you update your guide for Karmic (ready for the onslaught of people after aac encoding!) if you would consider adding in libopencore-amrwb-dev and libopencore-amrnb-dev as dependencies (and the appropriate ./configure options of course) thus making amr encoding + playback with ffplay possible?

All the best,

Andrew

[Henrikx]

ffmpeg -i video.mov video.mp4

and with mencoder ?

mencoder -oac pcm -ovc copy video.mov -o video.mp4

[sumero]

okay, i added some additional information to that bug report...

i even added the test.mov ( and test.mov.zip ) so you can download
and test it yourself.

https://roundup.ffmpeg.org/roundup/ffmpeg/issue1496?

for the record... here's my ffmpeg version
FFmpeg version SVN-r20337, Copyright (c) 2000-2009 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
built on Oct 21 2009 16:15:21 with gcc 4.3.3

the original trailer was called 'Bad Lieutenant' and it was 2+ minutes long
i "trimmed" it with quicktime and i saved it as 'test.mov' now it was 6 seconds
long.

so i run... ffmpeg -i test.mov
Duration: 00:02:29.19, start: -20.-208542, bitrate: 126 kb/s

obviously this is wrong, this is probably the original video trailer's
original duration

then i run.. ffmpeg -i test.mov test.mp4
frame= 198 fps= 74 q=31.0 Lsize= 606kB time=6.04 bitrate= 821.9kbits/s

then i run.. ffmpeg -i test.mov test.yuv
frame= 629 fps=182 q=0.0 Lsize= 350038kB time=26.23 bitrate=109303.0kbits/s

see, now its 26.33 seconds instead of 6.04

but on top of this, if i play test.mp4 on my computer or via flash
doesn't matter really, it actually plays for 8 seconds with a 2 second frozen
frame in the front.

i do not really know how these things work, is it seeking a b-frame or what
is going on, it's beyond me at this point.

anyway let's do some mplayer and mencoder tests on this same video.
for the record here's the version:

MPlayer SVN-r29789-4.3.3 (C) 2000-2009 MPlayer Team

when i run... mplayer test.mov -vo test.mp4
well i do not see any duration reports but let me paste a few things...

Starting playback...
A: 5.9 (05.8) of 149.2 (02:29.1) 0.1%

i am actually not sure what that means. but that number in the
parenthesis seems to match with ffmpeg -i test.mov 's duration so
it seems to perhaps think.. it is that long as well..

as far as A: goes, i am guessing that's how long it played total.

so yeh, these numbers are all wrong.

let's see what mencoder tells us, i expect the same since its
tied to mplayer anyway...


mencoder -oac pcm -ovc copy test.mov -o test.mp4


this time i will paste a lot, since i wanna show you how
it skips frames too..

mencoder -oac pcm -ovc copy test.mov -o test.mp4
MEncoder SVN-r29789-4.3.3 (C) 2000-2009 MPlayer Team

WARNING: OUTPUT FILE FORMAT IS _AVI_. See -of help.
success: format: 0 data: 0x0 - 0x23dc1f
libavformat file format detected.
[mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2 @ 0x1475b00]max_analyze_duration reached
[lavf] Video stream found, -vid 0
[lavf] Audio stream found, -aid 1
VIDEO: [H264] 848x448 24bpp 23.976 fps 0.0 kbps ( 0.0 kbyte/s)
[V] filefmt:44 fourcc:0x34363248 size:848x448 fps:23.976 ftime:=0.0417
================================================== ====
Opening audio decoder: [faad] AAC (MPEG2/4 Advanced Audio Coding)
FAAD: compressed input bitrate missing, assuming 128kbit/s!
AUDIO: 44100 Hz, 2 ch, s16le, 128.0 kbit/9.07% (ratio: 16000->176400)
Selected audio codec: [faad] afm: faad (FAAD AAC (MPEG-2/MPEG-4 Audio))
================================================== ====

and then there is this...

videocodec: framecopy (848x448 24bpp fourcc=34363248)
Writing header...
ODML: Aspect information not (yet?) available or unspecified, not writing vprp header.
Writing header...
ODML: Aspect information not (yet?) available or unspecified, not writing vprp header.
Pos: 0.9s 21f (53%) 0.00fps Trem: 0min 0mb A-V:0.083 [0:1411]
Skipping frame!
Pos: 1.3s 31f (53%) 0.00fps Trem: 0min 1mb A-V:0.083 [1383:1411]
Skipping frame!
Pos: 1.6s 41f (53%) 0.00fps Trem: 0min 1mb A-V:0.083 [1873:1411]


these SKIPPING FRAME! stuff goes on for a while, i wont paste it all.


and this is the end portion.


ODML: Aspect information not (yet?) available or unspecified, not writing vprp header.

Video stream: 2030.705 kbit/s (253838 B/s) size: 1916277 bytes 7.549 secs 199 frames

Audio stream: 1411.200 kbit/s (176400 B/s) size: 1064960 bytes 6.037 secs


it seems to be correct with AUDIO STREAM's duration as reported
above as ( 6.037 secs ) but.. as far as the video stream goes..

it's showing 7.549 secs, so, the result, longer video, shorter audio
and you get all sorts of problems.

i can tell it to not give me any audio and still the video is about 8 seconds
long, initial 2 seconds consisting of a frozen frame that is not even suppose to
be played because when i play the original TRIMMED test.mov on my imac
i never see that initial frame that mencoder/mplayer/ffmpeg show me after a
conversion.

sumero

[stoppage]

This is a guess. It may be libtheora-dev or libvorbis-dev causing your errors, but I think it is recordmydesktop because FFmpeg can usually make usable files with libtheora-dev or libvorbis-dev.



No, but you can compile it yourself. Here is a mini-guide:
1. Get the dependencies. I found out the dependencies by looking at the Arch Linux recordmydesktop build script and then finding the correct packages in Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install zlib1g-dev libvorbis-dev libxdamage-dev libxext-dev libsm-dev

2. Download the recordmydesktop source and check the md5sum to see if the file is valid:

cd
wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/recordmydesktop/recordmydesktop/0.3.8.1/recordmydesktop-0.3.8.1.tar.gz
md5sum recordmydesktop-0.3.8.1.tar.gz

The md5sum should equal: 6998b165540598965499bd99d8aa0eef.

3. Untar, ./configure, make, and install:

tar xzvf recordmydesktop-0.3.8.1.tar.gz
cd recordmydesktop-0.3.8.1
./configure
make
sudo checkinstall --pkgname=recordmydesktop --pkgversion "0.3.8.1" --default

Is this failing to create an output?

I installed recordmydesktop-0.3.8.1, now producing standard .ogg files, recognised by winff. Conversion to mp4 works from the command line but Winff has a problem, it returns „unrecognised option -me“. Winff installed version is 0.45.l.h-backto043. I prefer to use WinFF for conversions, I have a problem remembering mile-long command lines. Any ideas on how I might solve this latest little crisis? And thank you for your patience.

[FakeOutdoorsman]

Hi FakeOutdoorsman,

I was wondering when you update your guide for Karmic (ready for the onslaught of people after aac encoding!) if you would consider adding in libopencore-amrwb-dev and libopencore-amrnb-dev as dependencies (and the appropriate ./configure options of course) thus making amr encoding + playback with ffplay possible?

All the best,

Andrew

Hi Andrew,

Yes, I will take a look at the process, and if it isn't any harder than the other steps in this guide then I will definitely add it.

I installed recordmydesktop-0.3.8.1, now producing standard .ogg files, recognised by winff. Conversion to mp4 works from the command line but Winff has a problem, it returns „unrecognised option -me“. Winff installed version is 0.45.l.h-backto043. I prefer to use WinFF for conversions, I have a problem remembering mile-long command lines. Any ideas on how I might solve this latest little crisis? And thank you for your patience.

I'm not very familiar with WinFF, but I believe your WinFF presets were designed for an old FFmpeg because it is using outdated FFmpeg options. For more information read WinFF: How to install a newer presets file. An appropriate match seems to be presets-libavcodec52-v4.gz but I did not test this.

[EQuake]

Hello!
I'm using Ubuntu Karmic and i've followed the howto step by step.

Have anybody seem this error? I've compiled ffmpeg+x264 in 2 different machines, same result.

$ ffmpeg -i VTS_01_1.VOB -vcodec libx264 comercial.mp4
FFmpeg version SVN-r20376, Copyright (c) 2000-2009 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
built on Oct 27 2009 10:04:22 with gcc 4.4.1
configuration: --enable-gpl --enable-nonfree --enable-pthreads --enable-libfaac --enable-libfaad --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libtheora --enable-libx264 --enable-libxvid --enable-x11grab
libavutil 50. 3. 0 / 50. 3. 0
libavcodec 52.37. 1 / 52.37. 1
libavformat 52.39. 2 / 52.39. 2
libavdevice 52. 2. 0 / 52. 2. 0
libswscale 0. 7. 1 / 0. 7. 1

Input #0, mpeg, from 'VTS_01_1.VOB':
Duration: 00:08:23.70, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 2717 kb/s
Stream #0.0[0x1e0]: Video: mpeg2video, yuv420p, 720x480 [PAR 8:9 DAR 4:3], 7000 kb/s, 29.97 tbr, 90k tbn, 59.94 tbc
Stream #0.1[0x80]: Audio: ac3, 48000 Hz, stereo, s16, 192 kb/s
[libx264 @ 0xa3b3f20]broken ffmpeg default settings detected
[libx264 @ 0xa3b3f20]use an encoding preset (vpre)
Output #0, mp4, to 'comercial.mp4':
Stream #0.0: Video: libx264, yuv420p, 720x480 [PAR 8:9 DAR 4:3], q=2-31, 200 kb/s, 90k tbn, 29.97 tbc
Stream #0.1: Audio: aac, 48000 Hz, stereo, s16, 64 kb/s
Stream mapping:
Stream #0.0 -> #0.0
Stream #0.1 -> #0.1
Error while opening encoder for output stream #0.0 - maybe incorrect parameters such as bit_rate, rate, width or height

Everything is working if I don't use -vcodec libx264.

Any help will be appreciated.

Thanks!
Marcos