Not sure if this topic belongs here but I'd like to start off this first thread on FlaskMPEG. I've read accounts that it is excruitiatingly slow compared with other tools.

I downloaded their latest beta. Quite a lot of improvements have been made to it, functionality-wise, including the ability select a ranges and compressed them individually in a batch job sorta way. I like FlaskMPEG because it combines everything into one click-able interface. It handles subtitles, compresses videos spanning across multiple vob files, etc. As for slowness, I've used DivX 5.1 on there and it doesnt seem to be any slower than VirtualDubMod.

EDIT: Actually perhaps this belongs in the MPEG-4 Basic Usage Forum. Sowie.

Yeah this forum is strictly for MPEG-2 to MPEG-2 transcoding, but anyway, I don't know of anyone who uses FlaskMPEG as of now. I haven't used the latest beta's but I'm perfectly happy using AviSynth and VirtualDub as that gives virtually limitless functionality anyway. The quality of Flask was also never considerred to be as good.

Yeah, I got lost in this new place. Perhaps a mod or admin can assist in moving this to MPEG 4 Basic Usage....

The current trend has been VirtualDub or VirtualDubMod all the way for quite a while now. I'm not sure whether FlaskMPEG supports the YV12 colourspace, but the lack of it could slow encoding down when compared to VDubMod. That is, if your encoding chain uses YV12 to begin with, as in DVD to MPEG-4.

Edit:

Of course you have tried the recent GordianKnot?

Yes I have tried GordianKnot though not the most recent version (not sure if there is much difference). To me, the interface is very confusing and it seems to consist of multiple utilities grouped together under a tabbed interface. I find it a bit of cumbersome interface and I was totally lost when it came to including subtitles. In FlaskMPEG, when you open an IFO file, it shows you all the the available subtitles and audio channels where you just say "I want that and that too" and that is it.

That's pretty much it.

Video, audio and subtitles are different subcategories of A/V encoding and quite a few people use different applications for the job.

My preference is GordianKnot for cropping/resolution and bitrate calculation, DVD2AVI for demuxing, AviSynth for video decoding, VirtualDubMod for video encoding, BeSweet for audio decoding, Nero for AAC audio encoding (HE-AAC) and SubRip for subtitle OCR'ing. I prefer plain-text subtitles instead of direct subpictures.

After that, all of these different files and formats go to a nice Matroska container

GordianKnot is one of the best I think. If you have difficulties to use it you should read the guides on http://www.doom9.org
Have you ever tested GordianKnotItFast4U? You'll find it here: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?thre...20&pagenumber=1 I haven't tested it yet, but I heard that it is much easier to use!

Another good alternative which is much easier to use is Autodub. you find it at: http://www.video-tools.com/

Big_Berny

PS: There's a good Video-Forum at http://forum.doom9.org

Yes, I still use FlaskMPEG... I'm very lazy, very rarely back up DVD's and it suits my purposes well enough for light usage (along with Virtualdub afterward to demux the audio, increase it to reasonable volume and remux it). What's more, I hate all the crap Gordian Knot puts on the hard drive, and how it junks up the system registry. It's a very effective but horrendously ugly kludgy mess of a "program." Not amusing in the least, if you dislike turning your hard drive into the city dump.

Haven't tried the latest beta of Flask yet, still have v0.6 preview edition installed. I'll have to give it a try next time I feel like backing up a DVD (maybe once every few months).

I think Tom's hardware uses Xmpeg for their benchmarks, which I had read was the successor to FlaskMpeg. Or were you not counting that?

Actually, Intel benchmarking guidelines suggest the use of XMpeg, but it's a very bad habit. Unfortunately, Intel has enough push to halfway enforce a bad habit onto reviewers, but certain sites might come around to using more state of the art tools in the future. XMpeg is a split-off from Flask, Flask is still in development but progressing extremely slow.

As Big_Berny mentioned, today GKnot is pretty much the standard tool, with GKF4U probably taking over for XviD and DivX encoding in the future. And then there's Dr. DivX, a commercial DivX only toold.

I've encoded a lot of movies, using various programs, and I have to say that GorkianKnot is a very good program wich offers you the chance of encode high quality files, although it just has support for DivX 3.11, DivX 5.X, and XviD, and audio is limited to AC3 and MP3, it does its job.

It works here, cuz I need XviD files, with AC3 audio, so I chose GKnot over other programs...

BTW you don't have to install all pack files, just select what you want, and that's it.

Doesn't Gordian Knot default to using VBR MP3 (Lame, specifically) for sound when creating movies? If so -- bad idea, this has been discussed before on HA. VBR should not be used in the AVI container format.

By the way: With Autodub you can use OggVorbis instead of MP3 to improve the audioquality at the same bitrate!

you can use gordian knot just for processing the video. it doesn't force you to encode the audio, too. i use besweet for ac3 -> ogg conversion and mux it afterwards with virtualdubmod into matroska container.

Yeh, VBR MP3 in AVI is a hack. So is AC3. However, using something like AVImux GUI you can mux AVI/MP3 or AVI/AC3 generally without any problems. I'd still prefer Matroska for it's extensibility though.

Gordian Knot is a very good tool for the Pro's especially because it automates some of the more simple but timeconsuming things like AR and bitrate calculation, but still gives you the chance to fiddle with very complex avisynth scripts for filtering and blending/deinterlacing.

There are 2 other tools that i can recommend to the more 'basic' users, namely DVX and DVDtoOGM ( soon DVDtoMKV ).

DVX requires the .NET framework to be installed on your PC, what is scaring off many users because they dont trust Redmond. However, i have it installed on my Win2k box and its working fine for me, and DVX even has very good matroska support already, including anamorphic encoding wihtout resizing filter ( it looks marvellous for 2 CD rips, try it ! ), only disadvantage is you have to set the AR in the MKV header manually using the shell extension or the TCMP CDL.

As for DVDtoOGM, this tool will go opensource and become the new 'official' matroska creation tool then, renamed to 'DVDtoMKV' . The muxing process will be done with mkvmerge and it will allow

- direct vobsub muxing, compressed and uncompressed ( no OCR necessary )
- AAC an HE-AAC muxing
- SSA subs muxing
- anamorphic encoding with automatic AR setting in the track header ( mkvmerge )
- tagging
etc.

A more detailled spec can be found on corecodec.com in the forums

About FlaskMPEG : i wont use it as long as there is no MKV support for it .. ....

If you want a matroska file, its as easy as opening the avi created by FlaskMPEG in VirtualDubMod and choosing "Save As..."

I'd like to get an idea of speed here since the biggest advantage I've been hearing with using a frameserver like AviSynth is that there is no colour space conversion.

In FlaskMPEG 0.7, you can select the processing mode (RGB, YUV, or YV12), hence I am assuming that by selecting YV12 for encoding DVD video, FlaskMPEG (theoretically) isn't doing any colour space conversions and should be faster.

I did a quick informal test where I did a 2-pass encoding using DivX Pro 5.1.1 on a Pentium 4 2.4 GHz. I'm doing blend deinterlacing. For the first pass, I used Standard, PVE=off, MV=off. Second pass, I used Slow, PVE=fast, MV=off. Size of the video is 720 x 304.

1st pass: 29-30 fps
2nd pass: 4-5 fps

This is an informal test but do these numbers look extraordinary slow to you guys?