ffmpeg - windows & linux - why the difference?

[latev]

There's a -threads switch that ffmpeg accepts that sets the number of threads. WinFF also has an option to enable support for dual core processors in the preferences.

I know - that's what I'm talking about. This option is enabled and I tried with different numbers 2,4 - makes no difference whatsoever. In my case numbers up to 8 make sense to take advantage of the quad core multithreading CPU, however task manager always reports cpu utilization of around 12% and only one core appears to be active at a time.
This options is passed on to ffmpeg, so I guess it's a ffmpeg issue not winff

[Chronon]

I see. I saw a comment on the ffmpeg-user mailing list that setting "-threads 0" will request the maximum number of threads, but if it's not working with other values I don't hold out much hope this would work.

http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/...er/022737.html

[FakeOutdoorsman]

I see. I saw a comment on the ffmpeg-user mailing list that setting "-threads 0" will request the maximum number of threads, but if it's not working with other values I don't hold out much hope this would work.

http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/...er/022737.html

The option -threads 0 only works with -vcodec libx264. Otherwise, you have to manually select an appropriate number.

[Chronon]

Yes, I did read that. Either way, this doesn't really seem to help since latev doesn't see any improvement by setting the -threads to different values.

[latev]

I know this is probably a topic for a new thread but I was wondering if you guys know how one can convert a bunch of VOBs into one single xvid avi file. I couldn't work out the command options, don't want to go through intermediate file formats
Is there a way to append one avi file to another, without reconverting them first?

[FakeOutdoorsman]

There are several ways to do this. Luckily, VOB files are usually easy to join them together.

Using cat:

cat video1.vob video2.vob video3.vob > joined.vob

You can also use cat and pipe the output to FFmpeg:

cat video1.vob video2.vob video3.vob | ffmpeg -i - -acodec libmp3lame -qscale 3 output.avi

If that doesn't work, then you can try mpgtx:

mpgtx -j video1.vob video2.vob video3.vob -o - | ffmpeg -i - -acodec libmp3lame -qscale 3 -y poop.avi

See additional options with mpgtx -h (-P looks useful).

[latev]

I recommend using libx264. You'll get better results than libxvid.

I'm researching this new video codec that is supposed to produce the same or superior quality videos per storage unit used, however no matter what options I experiment with ffmpeg exits with a variety of error codes. I'm using the 32 bit version that came with winff and another x64 one that I downloaded from the net, but neither appears to be working.
Following the x264 encoding guide I tried their example options which resulted in errors such as

Unable to parse option value "BIT_RATE": undefined constant or missing ( Invalid value 'BIT_RATE' for option 'b'

or

File for preset 'fastfirstpass' not found

The WinFF options seem to be working for the first pass at least however after that I get

"Error while opening codec for output stream #0.0 - maybe incorrect parameters such as bit_rate, rate, width or height"

Googled for solutions and found 1 or 2 that didn't work in my case

And finally - how does the x264 codec compare to the standard XVID in terms of decoding CPU power?