anime.mikomi.org: Posts to "mencoder.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close"urn:uuid:amo-forum-topic-4872011-11-26T15:45:18Zmencoder.exe has encountered a problem and needs to closehttp://anime.mikomi.org/forum/showpost.html?num=487#5460every three years.
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2011-11-26T15:45:18ZDevil Dollhttp://anime.mikomi.org/by-rev/752.htmlmencoder.exe has encountered a problem and needs to closehttp://anime.mikomi.org/forum/showpost.html?num=487#54592011-11-26T14:40:44ZStretchstretch2424@yahoo.comhttp://anime.mikomi.org/by-rev/628.htmlmencoder.exe has encountered a problem and needs to closehttp://anime.mikomi.org/forum/showpost.html?num=487#5458at all. The aforementioned warm-up period of 10+ minutes before the player would even begin to read any DVD applied to permanent DVDs as well. This was what I had to get rid of.
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2011-11-26T02:21:03ZDevil Dollhttp://anime.mikomi.org/by-rev/752.htmlmencoder.exe has encountered a problem and needs to closehttp://anime.mikomi.org/forum/showpost.html?num=487#54572011-11-25T23:07:34ZStretchstretch2424@yahoo.comhttp://anime.mikomi.org/by-rev/628.htmlmencoder.exe has encountered a problem and needs to closehttp://anime.mikomi.org/forum/showpost.html?num=487#5456
I know this file is playable on my target device
I know where to find any particular anime
I can watch this anime without interruption from episode 1 to the end
most of which I couldn't do with a single episode I just downloaded. Most notably I have to wait until I collected a complete series before I can even begin to burn any permanent DVD due to requirement #3. So when I'm watching a series that's not completely released yet (such as Amagami or OreImo) I had to use rewritable DVDs.
The satellite issue in Germany isn't related to the transmission path (satellite), it's related to the transmission method (analog vs. digital) and identically applies to cable as well as satellite transmission. Your equivalent of my situation would be when your cable provider switched to ↗Digital cable mode which apparently happened before ↗June 12, 2009 in the United States. (Perhaps your new cable TV is broadcasting in HDTV resolution already, thus asking too much of your VHS player which might be limited to 720px width?)
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2011-11-24T18:54:46ZDevil Dollhttp://anime.mikomi.org/by-rev/752.htmlmencoder.exe has encountered a problem and needs to closehttp://anime.mikomi.org/forum/showpost.html?num=487#54552011-11-24T16:25:45ZStretchstretch2424@yahoo.comhttp://anime.mikomi.org/by-rev/628.htmlmencoder.exe has encountered a problem and needs to closehttp://anime.mikomi.org/forum/showpost.html?num=487#5452anything in the first place was that otherwise I would have completely lost the ability to receive German TV programs on April 30, 2012.
So, as I had to purchase a new satellite receiver anyway, I stumbled upon this box that also serves as recording device for TV programs. In order to do so, the box needs to be able to record videos and play videos - the latter being quite similar to what a DVD player is capable of doing. So would it be able to replace my DVD player in the process? The supported formats turned out to be way superior to what a DVD player can play (most notably HD formats and H.264 video streams); in order to make the whole conversion procedure for anime redundant the box would have to be able to support SSA subtitles. My current opinion is that yes, subtitle support is working to a certain degree - but not fast and complete enough for my personal needs. Hence I prefer sticking to the established conversion procedure for the time being - but only for anime with subtitles. (And for these, I can modify the conversion procedure slightly by making use of H.264 video encoding and occasionally HD resolutions - this was the point of posting in this thread.)
The core issue isn't the conversion to AVI, it's the on-the-fly interpretation of SSA subtitles which happen to be the standard format in today's MKV containers. When downloading anime in, say, MP4 containers the subtitles must have been burned into the video already (because MP4 can't contain subtitle streams, just like AVI) - so I can play MP4 fansubs with H.264 video in HD resolution directly. Unfortunately, only few fansubbers are releasing MP4 containers already - but at least MP4 releases are beginning to be more common than AVI releases these days, so the percentage of fansubs that I will play without conversion on the new box (with a GerSub for Kannagi having been the first of these series already) is increasing now while it was decreasing in the days of the DVD player. Also, there is a number of fansub releases in AVI/XviD but with a resolution larger than 720px in width (including the GerSubs for Kanon and Aa! Megami-sama - Sorezore no Tsubasa), and the new box can play these whereas a DVD player would have rejected them as "wrong format".
But the main benefit that I got from the purchase is that I was almost unable to reliably play DVDs on the old player anyway - whenever I wanted to do this I needed to give the DVD player some warmup period of at least 10 minutes, i. e. trying to play a DVD, wait for the error message "Can't read this DVD", turn the box off and on again, try again... which can become quite tiresome when you need to do this just for a single anime episode. And even when the DVD player decided to play a DVD there could still be reading errors on the disk, more so as I was using rewritable DVDs that tend to wear of at random positions of the disk after a while while the rest of the disk still works fine. Thus I was on the verge of additionally purchasing a new DVD player - which would have cost not much less than the new satellite receiver...
So as the whole use of DVDs had become very bothersome for me, and no DVD player has survived in our household longer than three years before the error rate increased massively, I finally decided DVD to be a dying breed, and was thus looking for a different and less error-prone storage medium - and I found it in the form of the USB stick, by separating the storage medium (DVD) from the video interpreter function (video player) which currently just happen to both be features of the DVD player.
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2011-11-24T14:00:32ZDevil Dollhttp://anime.mikomi.org/by-rev/752.htmlmencoder.exe has encountered a problem and needs to closehttp://anime.mikomi.org/forum/showpost.html?num=487#54512011-11-23T18:20:02ZStretchstretch2424@yahoo.comhttp://anime.mikomi.org/by-rev/628.htmlmencoder.exe has encountered a problem and needs to closehttp://anime.mikomi.org/forum/showpost.html?num=487#5450can play MKV containers with SSA subs on this device. It's just that
all formatting information of the subtitles (fonts, colors, bold/italics, fading effects etc.) is ignored and
the timing of the subtitles is pretty bad (too late, and often very short; apparently the built-in subtitle interpreter is too slow), making subtitles bothersome to read (too much "stop & rewind" necessary).
Therefore I decided that for the time being I'm still running the same old conversion procedure with all steps described above - with two significant differences:
The media player can play H.264 video streams, thus I can create encodings that are about 40% smaller in size than XviD encodings with the same video quality. ("Downgrading" H.264 to XviD was owed to using the "ancient" DVD player technology that's years behind current video formats, and that's something I no longer need to do now.)
The media player can play HD resolutions of up to 1920x1080px (i. e. BluRay quality). So I would not need to resize the resolution down to 704x396px for 16:9 material any more; in reality I'm still doing it because the file size is much smaller then and the difference on my 1366x768px "HD-ready" TV set is not really visible for my eyes.
I did play HD versions of the Haruhi and Evangelion movies on the new device just for testing how much the new box can do, and for such movies I would in fact try high resolutions first, for a maximum of screen visual experience.
- - -
As for burning DVDs, I'm still doing this for archiving purposes (hard disk capacity is never enough for everything). So when I want to "play an archived DVD" I have to do the following:
Insert the DVD into the DVD reader of my PC (then being accessible on Windows drive "E:")
Insert the USB stick into one of the many USB slots of my PC (then being accessible on Windows drive "K:")
Copy whatever files I want to watch from E: to K: (the USB stick capacity is 7.5 GB, i. e. larger than one DVD)
Extract the USB stick from the PC and insert it into the USB slot of the satellite receiver
Switch the satellite receiver from "receive TV program" to "play files from USB device" with the remote control
I just have to copy files from the DVD to the USB stick because the satellite receiver has no DVD drive. (And the DVD drive in my standalone player has been a problem for years in terms of reliability, producing occasional read errors and often not even accepting the DVD until a certain "warm-up period" of several minutes, thus I'm happy to no longer experience these problems now; the DVD drive in my PC is much more error-tolerant than any standalone DVD player.)
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2011-11-23T13:53:45ZDevil Dollhttp://anime.mikomi.org/by-rev/752.htmlmencoder.exe has encountered a problem and needs to closehttp://anime.mikomi.org/forum/showpost.html?num=487#54492011-11-22T18:35:55ZStretchstretch2424@yahoo.comhttp://anime.mikomi.org/by-rev/628.htmlmencoder.exe has encountered a problem and needs to closehttp://anime.mikomi.org/forum/showpost.html?num=487#5448 Some earlier posting in this thread contained my full video conversion procedure.
Said media player is capable of playing H.264 encoded video streams in AVI containers. And I have a H.264 encoder installed on my PC that can be used from VirtualDubMod.
So while H.264 isn't exactly what AVI containers were designed to contain, from now on I will create AVI containers with H.264 video streams that still have the subtitles hard-coded (because SSA subtitle stream support of my media player still leaves a lot to be desired), resulting in a minimal change of the procedure (just using H.264 with Quantizer 20 instead of XviD with Quantizer 2) while creating files that are 40% smaller without any visible loss of quality (judging by the first dozen episodes that I compressed with both procedures for the sake of comparison).
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2011-11-22T00:28:06ZDevil Dollhttp://anime.mikomi.org/by-rev/752.htmlmencoder.exe has encountered a problem and needs to closehttp://anime.mikomi.org/forum/showpost.html?num=487#4875 ↗VirtualDubMod (download from Sourceforge) is a code spin-off of VirtualDub with additional features (attempting to handle other containers such as OGM and even MKV as well), unfortunately with many bugs and not under maintenance since 2006 thus I considered usíng VirtualDub instead as a safety play. The GUI is almost the same, with slightly different menu entries.
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2011-01-13T04:13:55ZDevil Dollhttp://anime.mikomi.org/by-rev/752.htmlmencoder.exe has encountered a problem and needs to closehttp://anime.mikomi.org/forum/showpost.html?num=487#4876 ↗VirtualDubMod (download from Sourceforge) is a code spin-off of VirtualDub with additional features (attempting to handle other containers such as OGM and even MKV as well), unfortunately with many bugs and not under maintenance since 2006 thus I considered usíng VirtualDub instead as a safety play. The GUI is almost the same, with slightly different menu entries.
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2011-01-13T04:12:36ZDevil Dollhttp://anime.mikomi.org/by-rev/752.htmlmencoder.exe has encountered a problem and needs to closehttp://anime.mikomi.org/forum/showpost.html?num=487#48742011-01-13T00:23:06ZStretchstretch2424@yahoo.comhttp://anime.mikomi.org/by-rev/628.htmlmencoder.exe has encountered a problem and needs to closehttp://anime.mikomi.org/forum/showpost.html?num=487#4748 Recent example: Amagami SS. Eclipse (one of my favorite fan-subber groups for years, releasing AVI containers with SAP compatible encoding parameters for shows like Akane-Iro, Clannad, Kanon 2006, To Aru Majutsu no Index, Zero no Tsukaima) "entered hibernation mode" after episode 12 so I switched to UTW's AVI release, only to find that episode 13 was encoded in XviD with ↗QPel enabled (which makes my SAP display random video garbage at certain points within an episode) and an MP3 audio stream with ↗variable bitrate (which may or may not cause my SAP to reject the complete episode with the message "wrong file format"), both of which are known issues by SAP (the third one being ↗Global motion compensation where SAP support no more than 1 warp point, i. e. when MediaInfo shows "GMC3" as XviD encoding setting in the video stream then the episode will play on my device but occasionally hang and force me to reboot my SAP, or jump ahead 15-30 seconds at random positions within an episode... sigh). So I had to recode this episode before watching it.
Fortunately, UTW changed their encoding parameters to the same settings as Eclipse after I told them about the SAP issues in some forum (AVI releases in SD with hard-coded subtitles aren't meant to be the high-quality variant anyway compared to 1920x1080px H.264 video with softsubs in MKV containers these days, so why try ultra-fine-tuning AVI releases at the expense of SAP compatibility?), and from episode 16v2 on I can play their AVI releases without post-processing.
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2010-11-16T01:54:08ZDevil Dollhttp://anime.mikomi.org/by-rev/752.htmlmencoder.exe has encountered a problem and needs to closehttp://anime.mikomi.org/forum/showpost.html?num=487#47472010-11-15T18:11:17ZStretchstretch2424@yahoo.comhttp://anime.mikomi.org/by-rev/628.htmlmencoder.exe has encountered a problem and needs to closehttp://anime.mikomi.org/forum/showpost.html?num=487#47462010-11-13T22:38:49ZStretchstretch2424@yahoo.comhttp://anime.mikomi.org/by-rev/628.htmlmencoder.exe has encountered a problem and needs to closehttp://anime.mikomi.org/forum/showpost.html?num=487#4745scroll upwards in that "priority" dropdown menu and there access the lower priorities (of which "idle" would be the lowest one, i. e. the first entry in this menu).
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2010-11-13T17:13:19ZDevil Dollhttp://anime.mikomi.org/by-rev/752.htmlmencoder.exe has encountered a problem and needs to closehttp://anime.mikomi.org/forum/showpost.html?num=487#4744
(Fortunately, the audio tracks of Astro Fighter Sunred seem to already be in MP3 mode, so I didn’t need switch there)
I found the alternate VirtualDub Status Display, but under ‘Processing Thread Priority’ only three options were available: ‘Normal’, ‘Higher’, and ‘Even Higher’! What I need is to slow things down, right? I tried adjusting 'Speed Limit' to about a 50% of maximum (which is where it started). That seems to have helped; other tasks (especially on the internet) run more slowly than usual but don't take literally minutes to get underway, which is how things used to go.
So, two major problems more-or-less fixed. Thanks again!
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2010-11-13T15:49:00ZStretchstretch2424@yahoo.comhttp://anime.mikomi.org/by-rev/628.htmlmencoder.exe has encountered a problem and needs to closehttp://anime.mikomi.org/forum/showpost.html?num=487#4743VirtualDub has a Menu entry "View" / "Show Status Window"; enabling this setting makes VirtualDub show that "flashy" window (named "XviD Status") with the compression results (temporary quality levels, quantizer statistics etc.). Do the following: Schedule a compression task in VirtualDub, go to the VirtualDub Job Control (with F4), and start this job. You'll see that the VirtualDub window now (in "batch mode") has fewer menus but is still accessible. Now, select the menu entry "View" / "Show Status Window" again - it has a different meaning this time, enabling the window "Virtual Dub Status". (Ouch, this is indeed cryptic... the ancient VirtualDubMod has two separate menu entries for these two settings.)
My Switch still says "Unlimited free version 4.02" in menu "Help" / "About Switch Sound File Converter". The installation program I used was named "switchsetup_v4.02.exe", has a size of 421.984 bytes and a CRC32 checksum of "885995cc"; I selected none of the additional tools during installation. If everything else fails you might need to uninstall Switch 4 and downgrade to some older version; I've seen websites like this one or this one offering such versions but haven't checked any of these myself (as I have several older Switch installers in my software archive and my version 4.02 still works).
Note that any audio converter would work within this modular approach, so if you find one that suits you well enough it wouldn't change the whole procedure. To give you a slightly weird example: ↗WinAmp, the popular audio player program, ships with myriads of audio codecs, thus enabling it to play a large number of audio formats. What's more, there is a WinAmp plugin that allows to compress the selected audio stream to MP3 and write it into a disk file. So with this plugin you can turn WinAmp into an anything-to-MP3 converter (and this was actually the way I converted audio streams before I found Switch - it's just a bit awkward to always toggle the WinAmp configuration between "playing" and "converting to MP3" by enabling/disabling the plugin in the WinAmp configuration, Switch's GUI looks a lot more user-friendly). Using WinAmp instead of Switch would be a lot like using VirtualDub instead of AllToAVI - replacing a commercial black box by a more modular and extensible approach, at the expense of perhaps having to collect a necessary plugin for some future audio codec yourself instead of relying on an upgrade by the tool's releaser.
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2010-11-13T01:20:48ZDevil Dollhttp://anime.mikomi.org/by-rev/752.html