Problem with AVIs in TMPGenc and VirtualDub...

[PopGenie]

Okay: here's another one to pick your brains over.

I have a set of AVIs from Fushigi No Umi No Nadia (a.k.a. The Secret of Blue Water, a.k.a. Nadia). The set includes all 39 episodes and the epilogue. The files are from an old encode of Nadia and have some small errors, but they cause the programs I use to halt/stall.

In Virtual Dub, I ripped and recoded all the audio tracks to clean up the audio a little bit, make it a little more suitable. The video was put through VDub using the warpsharp and SmartSmoother filters to clean it up some and refresh the lines. I am please with the outcome of the files that have made it successfully, all things considered.

There are certain files that will not go through the filter process all the way. These I decided to leave alone (primarily because I don't know any other programs that re-encode AVIs with filters) and use the original AVIs that came off the discs to mux the new audio with in TMPGenc.

When I go to encode these files, they all stop at a certain point in the video where there seems to be an error of some sort. I have checked the AVI and it looks like a discoloration in the video with lots of pixel blocks that do not match any color in the frame. The message from TMPGenc (using batch encode) is "Illegal floating decimal point calculation order". That's Greek to me.

So now the questions:
1. What other program can I use to change the AVI file into an MPEG format?
2. Is there a way to get TMPGenc to 'ignore' the bad spots and continue the encoding process?
3. Is there a way to fix the bad spot in the original AVI so I can put it through filters and re-encode it?

Sorry for the long winded post, but I like to be specific when asking questions about stuff like this. Thanks in advance for your time --

PopGenie

[klinky]

you can try <a href="http://www.divx-digest.com/software/div ... >DivFix</a>, to repair the file as is. It's usually used for DivX but works most of the time with other codecs. Make a copy of the original before running it through...

Next you can use virtualdub to advance to the offending frames and hit "DEL" to remove then, you can then *TRY* to do a direct stream copy. Usually Virtual Dub is not frame accurate when doing a Direct Stream copy, it's usually best to delete the frames in-between two keyframes, then it seems to be more accurate.

If doing Direct Stream Copy in Vdub fails to remove all the frames, or removes too many, you can do full processing and use HuffYUV to get lossless output.... of course at the cost of alot of HDD space

Hopefully that'll work for you...


~klinky

[PopGenie]

Okay, I figured how to go frame by frame and edit in VDub, but it won't let me sucessfully remove certain frames without deleting all frames in between the keyframes in the affected portions of the video. This amounts to over 20 secs of video dropped in the first 5000 frames, and there are 38k frames in the episode. This is the worst of them, I think... I'm gonna try the DivFix and see what happens there.

Where can I get HuffYUV and perhaps go that method if the DivFix doesn't work? I have HDD space to spare, so....

PopGenie

[klinky]

http://math.berkeley.edu/~benrg/huffyuv.html


make sure you grab 2.1.1

[PopGenie]

I think I did the process right, but it didn't fix or remove the affected frames. VDub still gives me an error message on the same frames as before, but first had to reconstruct a file index, even though I had hit the rebuild on the DivFix program. I'm gonna try HuffYUV and see what happens then...

PopGenie

[PopGenie]

Okay, I opened the file in VDub, found the bad frames (2 of em) and clipped between keyframes (2.4 sec loss). Then every time I try to save the AVI, if audio is selected it gives an audio compression error. And if I deselect the audio (no audio) then it comes up as "File64 error: Invalid Handle" and won't encode the file. This is getting aggravating hehe!

PopGenie

[klinky]

man that sux... reboot the computer????


You doing a Direct Stream Copy of the audio?

hmmm


The file that would not convert.... :p


~klinky

[PopGenie]

Hehe! I hated to do it but I did reboot. A couple of times. This after I successfully kept the machine alive and encoding for 4 days straight!

Okay: I went through the original AVIs and found the individual bad frames. I found the latest known-good frame that was useable and the earliest known-good frame after the bad data. Using the mask tool I saved separate AVIs (file-a.avi, file-b.avi etc...) depending on how many bad frames I had found. I noted exact times that the last and first frames were for cutoff.

What I plan to do is slice and dice the WAV file to the same time frames as the cutoff/restart points in the new AVIs, then mux them separately to sync the audio correctly in the individual MPEGS, and finally re-join them with TMPGenc in the end to produce a contiguous file. Hopefully, this will work with a minimum of lost time/data.

Still can't get HuffYUV to do audio, but maybe that's because it doesn't. No matter, I have already ripped/re-encoded the sound tracks to the individual episodes.

PopGenie

[jbone]

A video codec doesn't work on audio, and vice-versa. Some codecs occasionally have both an audio and a video codec of the same name, but they're still separate codecs.

[PopGenie]

Okay, I found that I can save the WAVs using the same mask tool as I use to clip out the bad frames, so that saves some time... The audio problem I was having was only when I tried to save the audio and video to the same stream. Separately the components work, just together they don't like each other.

This process of saving separate AVIs and matching WAVs seems to be working. I have completed 2 of 9 bad episodes and the results are quite acceptable, and data/frame loss is at a minimum. Of course, there is some work involved... but if it was easy everyone would be doing this kind of stuff!

Thanks to Klinky who really knows his stuff. I'll post updates etc. if I encounter any more difficulties while making these AVIs work.

PopGenie