Forum:Some sound formats crashing tovid.

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I use tovid to convert video files to DVD-complaint MPEGs then use an authoring package to finish the work.

I'm running into a problem due to the distressingly large number of audio formats that cause ffpmeg to barf. Re-compiling ffmpeg to include large numbers of audio formats is a pain and I still manage to find formats that I cannot add to ffmpeg by any means. This does not happen often, but it's a colossal pain when it does.

Earlier versions of the tovid script would use mplayer to extract the sound stream to a .WAV file then use ffmpeg to convert it to ac3 (US formats here). I'm trying to figure out if I can tweak the 0.31 tovid script to include that behavior as an option, or even an automatic fallback if ffmpeg fails. This would save huge amounts of time chasing down support for the odd sound format I run across, given that there seems to be no sound format that mplayer does not know how to handle.

I realize that this would bring a time and sound quality penalty, but speed is not really a priority, reliability is. I can deal with the fractional loss in sound quality from the extra processing.

Basically, I'm hoping someone here has already done something like this or has some hints to give. I've written small programs in the past, so I can probably get this done given long enough, but I'll take any tips to speed things along.

Any suggestions?

MikeVx 01:36, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

Some progress. I loaded an old tovid (0.23) into an Ubuntu VM I was testing stuff with. I can now convert the files that 0.31 blew lunch on. I use a networked folder to get files into and out of the VM. Performance is pathetic, what with VM overhead and task splitting, but it works.

I do the first pass in the VM using 0.23 and send it back to the main system for further processing with 0.31. I've learned that there are certain combinations of effects that fail in irritating ways, so I have to apply them on separate passes.

Is there somewhere I can put in a feature request to have the old-style mplayer sound processing enabled as an option? Say, -mplayer, kind of like --ffpmeg is used to make ffpmeg do video. I love tovid for conversions, but the sound issue is getting harder to deal with. Recently more files have oddball sound formats that won't work with ffmpeg.

MikeVx 02:01, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

Dropping in to repeat my request for an option to have mplayer extract the sound and feed it to ffmpeg directly. I am still having problems with some audio formats crashing ffmpeg, and while the whole routine of using an older version of tovid in a virtual machine continues to work, it is rather more fiddly than I want to deal with. I'll accept suggestions on how I can lift the relevant code from tovid 0.23 and insert it into 0.33.

MikeVx 03:54, July 7, 2011 (UTC)

--Grepper 09:55, July 11, 2011 (UTC)

Strange, this is something I have rarely encountered. ffmpeg should support everything at least that mplayer does, as you say, assuming support is compilied in. In any case,have you tried just dumping the audio as wav with mplayer (as per the commands in the older tovid), dumping the video, remuxing, then feeding the new file to the newer tovid ? If you put it in a script then it would be fairly easy to use.