The VideoLAN Forums

I tried to transcode the first title from a DVD to h.264 with the following command line:

VLC dvd://"c:\abc\DVD\VIDEO_TS"@1 :sout=#transcode{vcodec=h264,vb=1024,scale=1,acodec=mp4a,ab=192,channels=2}:duplicate{dst=std{access=file,mux=mp4,dst="c:\abc_1.mp4"}}

This normally takes 3 hrs for a 2 hr movie so I left it running and went to work. When I got back (9 hrs later) the mp4 file was of a size that suggested the transcode had completed but the player was going crazy: the progress bar was shooting across from 0-100% a couple times a second and the CPU was still pegged at 100%. When I forcibly closed VLC the file didn't play, so something didn't finalize correctly.

I tried a few other titles from other DVDs ripped to my harddrive, and a problem did occur whenever a title was over 1g in size (more than 1 VOB). I wasn't able to reproduce the 100% cpu problem with a 2 VOB title but the player didn't correctly stop at the end, but sat at 50% progress in a 1 second length progress bar and 0% cpu forever.

When I Quickstream or otherwise process the VOBs with VideoRedo into an Mpeg-2 PS file first VLC transcodes to h.264 without a problem, so it's an issue with DVDs and h.264, not just h.264. VLC 0.8.6-test1 also has no trouble just re-encapsulating the same DVD title that failed to transcode to h.264 into a Mpeg-2 PS.

Anyone else seeing a similar problem?

Further testing reveals that if I try to play or transcode a single title of a DVD at the end of the title VLC jumps to the DVD Menu and starts playing that. When transcoding (or re-encapsulating) a title the menu gets stuck on the end of the created file.

Use DVD (simple) instead and state the title and sound track.

But really VLC is not a ripping program and I seriously doubt that it will work off hd with out having the whole DVD in place. Like riping it to hd drive as many programs do where it's not in the original form and really this isn't necessary anyway. It can be done as a one step process rather than two.

So in a nut shell you are creating your own problems through concepts.

BTW It generally take 3 hrs to do 1 hr of H.264 (AVC), MP4a (AAC) in a MP4 container. At least for me with my current settings.

Yeah, use Handbrake

Switching to dvdsimple fixed my problem, I guess it just didn't occur to me to try that radio button when figuring out the script by playing with the gui. Silly me.

I have the DVD on my harddisk in its original form using a 3rd party ripper so VLC works fine for this task. The reason I wanted to use VLC is that VideoRedo converts sets of VOBs rather than titles to mpeg-2, and I didn't want to install yet another video processing package (Handbrake on Windows).

I double-checked and on my new Athlon XP 2 3800+ system it's taking about 2hr to convert 1hr of mpeg-2 to h.264/mp4a in an mp4 container at 1kbps. At 2kbps it's more like 3hrs like you said DJ.

Well! I have changed many of the default options in x264 trying to bring the quality up a bit for a single pass only situation. In the process I have found some options that don't function correctly like B-frames and a few that still seem backward to me or have very poor designations that have caused me to research them But over all (because the bitrate is ABR) that whole range (from 768 - 2048) is about 3 to 1. This is the most used for me and our machines are similar.

I saw your post on the various x264 option issues. When the promised changes are entered perhaps you'd start a thread on the various encoding speed vs. image quality vs. bit-rate theories you've come up with. I'm just using the defaults.

To some degree it is always dependent on the source material as to the settings and I run some three to five minute samples of the dificult sections to know where I'm at.

http://www.digital-digest.com/articles/ ... page1.html

http://mewiki.project357.com/Video_conf ... figuration

There are more I have run across on the doom9 forum. Some that describe the settings in depth.

The changes have already shown up in the nightly builds for VLC 0.8.6. The one that I'm using at the moment is Oct 31 06.