Max recording time: 1:27:57

[goninzo]

Greetings,

I've tried a few things, and I'm kind of at my wits end here. For some reason, I cannot properly encode any show that is longer than an hour and twenty eight minutes. And it truncates it at the 1:27:57 mark if it is longer. So, I record a 2 hour movie, it's fine up until three am when the encoding process starts, and then it turns into a one and a half hour movie. It's very aggrivating.

Anyone have any thoughts? This is on a decent computer with memory and hard drive space, I've tried XVID and DIVX, I'm running 0.98.8, it's a hauppauge 150, I tried the special time stamp drivers. I confirmed that it is recording things for multiple hours, but it's just during the encoding process that it's getting truncated. It's usually around 2.72 gig at that size, but it's always the same time stamp. I am going to turn off 'delete originals after encode' and see if I can't see any commonalities, but it's very strange.

I would happily accept any suggestions. Thanks.

gonzo

[pBS]

look around in the forums,it's been mentioned many times before...ffmpeg bug...
[i believe..]
search for the time like 1:27

[sub]

Yes, ffmpeg limitation. You can reduce the bitrate to get a bit longer.

[goninzo]

For those searching, here is the thread discussing this:
http://forums.nextpvr.com/showthread.php...ght=ffmpeg

It might be good to add this to the list of stickies, I have to imagine that everyone eventually has a problem with this bug if we're all using it.

But I still don't see a real solution other than lowering the bit rate, and why some people have the issue, while others do not. Nor why I have the exact same file length if I use Divx or XVid. I'd rather see a permenant fix of some kind implemented. I will experiment with a real solution.

[sub]

To fix it you can install another encoder like mencoder, and change the setting in config.xml to use mencoder.exe.

I wont be fixing the limitation ffmpeg - its not my app, and I've got enough of my own stuff to worry about.

[-stattik-]

gogninzo,

Have you tried newer versions of ffmpeg? Perhaps a more recent build can fix the problem.

http://ffdshow.faireal.net/mirror/ffmpeg/

Note: Not all versions of ffmpeg are compiled the same. (IE:The version used in GBPVR may have more/less features than the binaries at the site above.)

[goninzo]

Sub: Completely understand, just would like a canned solution, so it will be easy for anyone to implement. Hopefully once we have something written as a solution, we can give it to people to do.

stattik: yeah i had come to that same conclusion, in fact, the exact same build site. hehe I was going to try everything out, get a valid file going, and then write up something to make it easy for people. So we'll see what I come up with when all my testing is complete.

[Uisge]

I have encounted this same ffmpeg bug and have been looking for a solution and finally have one.

I tried various versions of ffmpeg and they all seemed to have this problem.

I tried mencoder and wasn't happy with it.

I tried th Dr.DivX cli and wasn't completely happy with it as it puked on some of the GBPVR recordings and wouldn't convert them. (otherwise I was very happy with it)

Finally I uncovered the WinFF project at http://www.biggmatt.com/

It is a nice simple GUI front end to ffmpeg. Basically a poor mans Dr. DivX. It is useful for when you want to do a manual conversion and to try out various ffmpeg settings.

The real winner is however that the ffmpeg binary and dlls that are bundled with it work. They have always produced good quality results for me and have not displayed the problem of not encoding the entire file. I have just dropped them in place of the binaries that were bundled with GBPVR and the incomplete transcoding problem went away.

The files are dated 09/05/2006 and as far as versioning and compile options look like:

FFmpeg version SVN-r6179, Copyright © 2000-2004 Fabrice Bellard
configuration: --extra-cflags=-I/shared/include --extra-ldflags=-L/shared/lib --enable-memalign-hack --enable-shared --disable-static --enable-mp3lame --enable-xvid --enable-a52 --enable-libogg --enable-vorbis --enable-faac --enable-faad --enable-x264 --enable-pp --enable-amr_wb --enable-amr_nb --enable-avisynth --enable-gpl
libavutil version: 49.0.0
libavcodec version: 51.13.0
libavformat version: 50.5.0
built on Sep 5 2006 22:10:54, gcc: 3.4.5 (mingw special)

Good luck everyone. I hope this solution works for others.

Regards,

Uisge

[fering]

I started transcoding the other day and ran into this problem. I just finished trying with the version of ffmpeg from WinFF and it worked for a 2:12 recording.

Thanks Uisge!