Stop me if I’m reiterating something that is well known, but when I’m trying to output to MPEG (any version) in 2.55 (official and a recent build from graphicall), I get an error in the top panel stating the video stream cannot be initialised.
My understanding is that the devs made a decision to exclude the FFMPEG libraries from the official release. Is this the case? I have seen some builds on graphicall that include FFMPEG in the title…why do I have to download 14 different versions of Blender to get what I need?
Unfortunately you can have ANY combination of codecs, bit rates, screen sizes and containers but they may not work. I really wish there was a repository of known correct setups. No good data base of presets as it were. You often have to translate the ffmpeg settings to Blenders version, which can be frustrating.
So what you’re saying is that if i see MPEG in the encoders list, the libraries ARE available, I just have to find a parameter setting that is sane for the encoder to work?
OK I seem to have gotten it working. Indeed 3pointEdit was right, the default settings for the encoder make no sense to the encoding algorithm so it fails. There is a list of presets available in a dropdown list under “encoding” that work (DV, DVD, SVCD etc) but be careful as they will alter your frame size and aspect.
Yeah and some releases of Blender wont change settings when the presets are changed. Presets for youtube and ipods would be good. Especially the audio settings, they can really stuff you up. Often VLC will play a weird Blender render fine but nothing else will. Giving you a false positive result.
Just incase anyone else has the same problem and can’t fathom it like I did…
I spent ages trying different settings in the dimensions tab and nothing seemed to work :mad:
Every time I changed the output to anything but AVI Raw it failed.
What I didn’t notice was the “Render” tab bellow the output tab o:o
AVI raw will output with incorect settings like 0 bitrate and VLC etc; will display the avi ok, but video editing software like cinelerra won’t work with the file with incorrect timings :eek:
That was 2 days of frustration caused by not seeing the “Render” options as they were collapsed.
Surely “Render” should be part of the output box not tucked away?
This issue is further complicated by the scarce rendering options for most of the containers/codecs compared e.g. to 2.49x. In the pre 2.5 versions one was provided with more choices which is not the case for 2.5x. For instance, assume that one sets avi as a container and uses h.264 as a codec. There’s only a few parameters one can adjust: bps, gop, min/max, buffer, rate, packet size. As they are not directly translatable to ffmpeg settings, it is sometimes very hard to understand what the heck these mean and how they might affect rendered videos (e.g. wtf is mux rate and what the hell does the default value 10080000 denote?).
Finally, all recent svn builds I’ve tried render low quality videos even after setting the bitrate at 10mbps and gop size at 1!!! I’m trying to render a few 720p videotutorials and no container/codec combination produces acceptable results for that resolution. Atm, the only high quality output I can get out of Blender is huffy!
Will continue testing…
@3point: gop actually denotes the distance (measured in frames) between two I frames. According to the specs, gop 1 is precisely what I’m after because it would compress every frame separately, resulting in practically lossless encoding. After playing around with it this evening I came to the conclusion that while one can use -g 1 when using ffmpeg from the cl, doing so from within Blender results in the lowest quality videos I’ve ever seen! :0
Setting gop to 1 does not work with any of the recent builds tested (on my Kubuntu 10.10 system, Blender 2.56, r35840, ffmpeg compiled from svn 3 days ago), which kinda sux given what I wanted to do.
Anywayz, setting it to 5 combined with a very high bitrate (>10mbps) does the trick and the encoded file is not discernibly different compared to the lossless screen captured one. What a relief!
Still, whatever I mentioned in my former post on this thread still holds and I’d appreciate any tips/pointers/explanations.
btw: did not mean to highjack the thread, will start a new one once I’m done testing but all this seemed timely and relevant
I downloaded the x64 and 32-bit versions of 2.37. Both give me the same message: Error Initializing Video Stream. Some presets do work, and I notice that changing the resolution to presets will allow some renders to complete. This is a problem though, because it means that the original video must be scaled, and this means I need to adjust the aspect ratio also. Some presets do not work, and still require tweaking.
o:o
