Welcome to Doom9's Forum, THE in-place to be for everyone interested in DVD conversion.

Before you start posting please read the forum rules. By posting to this forum you agree to abide by the rules.

 

Go Back   Doom9's Forum > Capturing and Editing Video > VirtualDub, VDubMod & AviDemux

 
 
Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
Prev Previous Post   Next Post Next
Old 23rd May 2007, 17:11   #1  |  Link
LoRd_MuldeR
Software Developer
 
LoRd_MuldeR's Avatar
 
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Last House on Slunk Street
Posts: 13,248
[Avidemux] ***FAQ*** <2008-10-02>


Avidemux main window (QT4 Interface)


Avidemux main window (GTK+ Interface)


Avidemux "Filter Manager" window


What the heck is Avidemux?

Imagine an application which does everything VirtualDub can do, but runs on various platforms, supports a lot of containers, comes with all Codecs you need built-in and doesn't use the nasty VfW interface. That applications is Avidemux! And now the "official" version: Avidemux is a free video editor designed for simple cutting, filtering and encoding tasks. It's graphical user interface looks pretty similar to VirtualDub and most features known from VirtualDub are available too. Avidemux natively supports a great number of file types, such as AVI, MPEG, VOB, TS, MP4, ASF, OGM, MKV and FLV. At the same time Avidemux natively supports a wide range of Video/Audio formats, including MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 ASP, H.264/AVC, DV, HuffYUV, MP3, AAC, AC-3 and Vorbis. Tasks can be automated using projects, job queue and powerful scripting capabilities. Video-DVD or (S)VCD compliant streams can be created with easy-to-use "Auto" wizards. Multi-threading is supported!


What OS is Avidemux availabe for and who made it?

Avidemux is developed as a cross-platform application. It is available for Linux, BSD, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows under the GNU GPL license. The program was written from scratch by Mean <fixounet at free dot fr>, but code from other people and projects has been used as well. Avidemux is not a front-end to MPlayer/MEncoder, ffmpeg or anything else! Avidemux is a "standalone" application and it's fully self-contained. There are absolutely no dependencies, expect for the libraries that ship with Avidemux. Most of the Win32 development is done by Gruntster now, who has done some great improvements. Patches, translations and bug reports are always welcome.


Where can I get Avidemux?

The official Avidemux web-site is http://www.avidemux.org/. You can download pre-compiled binaries for the Windows platform from the official site, but those builds are not updated very often! Therefore it's highly recommended to grab the latest SVN build from Gruntster's web-site at http://avidemux.razorbyte.com.au/ or http://mulder.dummwiedeutsch.de/. Gruntster's builds are updated almost daily, so they contain the latest fixes and improvements. Pre-compiled binaries for MacOS/Intel can be found at http://harryvanderwolf.dyndns.org/. If you want to compile Avidemux yourself, you can grab the sources directly from the SVN server at svn://svn.berlios.de/avidemux/. A lot of useful information about Avidemux, compile instructions and guides can be found in the Avidemux Wiki at http://www.avidemux.org/admWiki/. For bug reports and feature requests, please visit the forum at http://www.avidemux.org/admForum/.


What encoders are supported by Avidemux?

Avidemux comes with several video encoders built-in: Xvid (MPEG-4 ASP), x264 (H.264 aka AVC), libavcodec (MPEG-4 ASP, MPEG-2, MPEG-1, FLV, HuffYUV, FFV1, MJPEG, H.263, DV) and mpeg2enc (MPEG-1, MPEG-2). Also it includes various audio encoders: LAME (MP3), FAAC (LC-AAC), Aften (AC3), Ogg Vorbis and TwoLAME (MP2). Please note that Avidemux does not support the platform-specific and outdated 'Video for Windows' (VfW) interface and it never will! This means there is absolutely no way to use DivX (or any other VfW-based Codecs) with Avidemux! But don't worry: Avidemux will open all files, that were encoded with DivX, just fine. Avidemux simply uses it's own (internal) MPEG-4 decoder instead of the proprietary DivX decoder. Furthermore the files encoded with Avidemux and Xvid will play 100% fine on a "DivX certified" player, as long as you use the appropriate encoder settings...


What video filters are supported by Avidemux?

Avidemux comes with a wide range of video filters built-in. Most of those filters were ported from MPlayer, VirtaulDub or Avisynth. There are filters for Cropping, Resizing (Bilinear, Bicubic and Lanczos) and Expanding. For processing of interlaced video, there are various Deinterlacing and IVTC filters (e.g. Yadif, TDeint, Kernel Deinterlacer, Smart Deinterlace, mcDeinterlace, DGBob and Decomb Telecide). Furthermore there are filters for Denoising (FluxSmooth, denoise3d/hqdn3d, Stabilize, Temporal Cleaner, etc.), Sharpening (MSharpen, asharp, etc.), Color Correction and many more. Last but not least there is a new plugin system for 'external' video filters now. So you can add additional filters to Avidemux without re-compiling!


How do I open Avisynth scripts in Avidemux?

Opening Avisynth scripts in Avidemux is a little bit tricky: First of all you have to make sure that Avisynth is installed properly on your computer. Then you must to open the AVS script file with the AVSProxy (avsproxy.exe), which ships with Avidemux. Once the AVSProxy is running, you can go back to the Avidemux main application and select 'Connect to avsproxy' from the 'File' menu. Please note that audio input is not supported via AVSProxy yet. There also is a GUI for the AVSProxy (avsproxy_gui.exe), which hopefully makes your life easier...


Why there are different front-end/execuatbles for Avidemux?

There are currently three different user interfaces available for Avidemux! Each one has it's own executable file: The GTK+ based interface (avidemux2_gtk.exe) is the first graphical user interface that was developed for Avidemux. The Qt4 based interface (avidemux2_qt4.exe) was developed as an alternative to GTK+ and development seems to focus on Qt4 now. Also the QT4 interface offers native M$ Windows look & feel, which most users seem to prefer. Note that you can run the Qt4 interface with "-style" command to change the theme, e.g. "-style cleanlooks" or "-style plastique". Finally there's the CLI version of Avidemux (avidemux2_cli.exe), which runs without any graphical user interface. The CLI interface is used from a console and it's intended for batch processing.


How can I save/load my x264 or Xvid settings in Avidemux?

You can use Avidemux' scripting engine for that purpose: First run Avidemux, open some video file (it doesn't matter which one) and setup the x264/Xvid configuration as you want to save it. Next save your project via "File" -> "Save project as..." to a script file (e.g. my_x264_config.js) and exit Avidemux. Then open the resulting script file with your favorite text editor (e.g. Notepad++) and remove all the unneeded lines. All you need to keep are the "app = new Avidemux()" and the "app.video.codec(...)" lines. If you also want to save the audio Codec config, then keep the "app.audio.codec(...)" line too. Finally save the script file to the "C:\Documents and Settings\John Doe\Application Data\avidemux\custom" directory. From now on your script will show up in the "custom" menu in Avidemux' main window. Simply run that script to restore your configuration. The script might look like this:
var app = new Avidemux();
//** Video Codec conf **
app.video.codec("X264","AQ=22","188 00 00 00 00 00 00 ..... 00 00 ");
//** Audio **
app.audio.codec("lame",128,12,"00 00 00 00 02 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ");
//End of script

How do I open several files/segments as one big file?

Run Avidemux and open the first file via "File" -> "Open...". Now you can append all the other files/segments: Simply use "File" -> "Append..." for each file you like to add. Please note that all files need to be in the same format! Furthermore they all need to have the same resolution and the same framerate. If you want to merge files with different formats, framerates or resolutions, then you must convert (re-encode) the individual files to a uniform format before joining them together!


Why do my MPEG-2 files get out of sync when I cut/edit them in Avidemux?

Captured MPEG files are generally from DVB S/T (in MPEG TS format) or from IVTV based cards or any other card with hardware MPEG-2 encoding (in MPEG PS format). These captures often contain transmission errors which end up as missing or broken frames! A video player (MPC, MPlayer, xine, VLC, etc.) will constantly re-sync the streams using the timing information embedded in the stream. Avidemux will not! Apart from the constant shift, which is easily recoverable using the timeshift filter, it will result in a growing synchronisation issue when encoding or transcoding. Even saving without re-encoding will be async! MythTV recordings are a prime example of this problem: The audio will be offset by approximately -330 ms at the start of the recording and the drift throughout the duration of the recording. Please note that not all MythTV recordings have this problem, just some depending on the software and hardware configuration. The only 100% reliable way to fix your MPEG-2 files is to use ProjectX. You can get ProjectX from http://project-x.sourceforge.net/, a tutorial can be found at http://www.avidemux.org/admWiki/inde...itle=Project_X.


How can I set the target filesize (e.g. 700 MB) in Avidemux?

If you want to encode your video to a specific filesize, e.g. 700 MB to fit on a CD-R, you need to use the "2 Pass" encoding mode. The 2-Pass mode is available for Xvid and x264 as well as for the MPEG-1/MPEG-2 encoders. It will give you maximum quality for a given filesize. In order to use the 2-Pass mode, choose "Two pass, final/video size" in the video encoder's "Configure" dialog. Then enter the desired size (in MBytes) in the edit box below. But take care: This value applies to the video size only, it does not take the audio size into account! Hence the size entered in the "Configure" dialog will not equal the total size of your output video, unless there is no audio stream in your file. In order to set up the target filesize properly, please use the "Calculator" tool! In the Calculator window choose your output container (e.g. AVI), choose your target media (or custom size) and enter the audio bitrate you have selected. Finally press the "Apply" button, before you close the Calculator window! Now the video encoder has been configured according to your desired total filesize and you can save your video.


Why I don't hear sound in Avidemux?

In most cases this is simply because you didn't enabled sound yet! By default Avidemux's audio output is set to "DUMMY", which means there is no audio output at all. Just go to "Edit" -> "Preferences" and switch to the "Audio" tab. Then change "Audio output" to "WIN32" or whatever suits your OS. Finally click the OK button. Now you should hear sound.


What do "Copy" mode and "Smart Copy" mean?

In Avidemux you can select "Copy" mode for both, audio and video, which equals "Direct Stream Copy" in VirtualDub. This means the streams will be copied "1:1" from the input file without any processing or re-encoding. Of course you can not apply any audio/video filters in that mode! Unfortunately the "Copy" mode requires the very first frame of your selection to be an I-Frame (Key Frame). That's because video files necessarily have to start with an I-Frame! Nevertheless Avidemux has a nice feature, which is called "Smart Copy". It gets used automatically in case you use the "Copy" mode, but the first frame of your selection is not an I-Frame. SmartCopy will only re-encode the frames that are located before the very first I-Frame. The rest of the video is copied 1:1 from the original video. Hence SmartCopy will only effect the first few seconds of the video (if it all), while the rest will be not be modified at all. Please note that "Smart Copy" is currently limited to MPEG-4 ASP (Xvid, DivX, etc.) video files!


How to enable DTS and AMR-NB support?

The decoders for DTS and AMR-NB aren't distributed with Avidemux due to patent right issues. However Avidemux 2.4 can automatically detect and use these libraries once they're installed. So if you'd like to decode DTS and AMR-NB soundtracks with Avidemux, download the libraries from http://rapidshare.com/files/47541079...win32.zip.html and drop them in your Avidemux folder. To check whether they're installed correctly, have a look at the "Help" -> "Built-in Support" window in Avidemux and search for libdca/amrnb.


Tutorial: How to convert an AVI file to Video-DVD format with Avidemux
http://mulder.dummwiedeutsch.de/etc/...nk/avi2dvd.htm

Tutorial: DVD Authoring Guide for Avidemux (using DVD Styler and ImgBurn)
http://www.avidemux.org/admForum/viewtopic.php?id=3570
Attached Images
File Type: pdf Avidemux_FAQ.2007-12-10.pdf (180.5 KB, 4353 views)
File Type: pdf Avidemux_DVDAuthoringGuide.2007-12-10.pdf (76.3 KB, 3666 views)
__________________
Go to https://standforukraine.com/ to find legitimate Ukrainian Charities 🇺🇦✊

Last edited by LoRd_MuldeR; 3rd October 2008 at 01:40.
LoRd_MuldeR is offline   Reply With Quote
 

Tags
avidemux, faq

Thread Tools Search this Thread
Search this Thread:

Advanced Search
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off

Forum Jump


All times are GMT +1. The time now is 15:03.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.8.11
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, vBulletin Solutions Inc.