Video Charge and FFMPEG
 

I've been encoding some videos using Video Charge. I leave all of the Video Charge settings as default, aside from resolution. The video then gets run through FFMPEG and that's where the problem starts. Always an encoding error.

What can I do to figure out why this is happening? I just want to narrow down if it's Video Charge or my source video, that way I can fix the problem and move forward.

whats the error ?

I really don't know. When I run it through a tube script it just tells me encoding error. What can I do to get better details?

It sounds like a codec issue on the server. Although could be a couple things.
:2 cents:

uhm.
Not sure if its opensource or not but try to search for the exact ffmpeg command that is used and run it from a terminal. You will see the exact error there.
Alternatively see if anything is showing in your apache logs.

Yeah, check the Apache error log, PHP error log and syslog. just search for "ffmpeg".

If you've command line access just run

cat /your/path/to/apacheerrorlog |grep "ffmpeg"
cat /your/path/to/phperrorlog |grep "ffmpeg"
cat /your/path/to/syslog |grep "ffmpeg"

You can find the paths to the logs in your httpd.conf (apache), php.ini (php) and syslog.conf (syslos)

if its a php script, check you don't disable functions like shell_exec, etc.

give those pipes a break :)
grep ffmpeg /your/neat/path/to/logs

Definately a plan if they're all in the same directory :winkwink:

actually that was not the point :)
your usage of "cat file|grep string" is better used as:
"grep string file"
avoiding an extra pipe

Your error is likely this,

[libmp3lame @ 0x806e350]lame: output buffer too small (buffer index: 9404, free
bytes: 388)
Audio encoding failed

The error is a non-issue and should be ignored.

I hate Video Charge because of that. A little smart program full of errors. Try to run VCS as administrator (right click you will see). That is the mother of most problems.

login via ssh to your server, find out what command your script is passing to FFMPEG, and run it yourself, see what errors come back. FFMPEG can be quite verbose, and this method will give you more info the syslog or apache logs.

my guess would be that likely there was errors in your source video, video charge is not very good at repairing things at all. you could try downloading MpegStreamClip from Squared5.com, open yourvideo file and have it repair the video file, then save it again, and restart.

why encode twice...if you have to you should load a rendered AVI and not the final format such as mp4 or 3gp through ffmpeg.

Why are you encoding through Video Charge then re-encoding on your server with FFmpeg. FFmpeg is total crap for FLVs; H.264 is okay because they use the x264 library.

Why not encode your videos to FLV VP6 using On2 Flix or Sorenson or Adobe Media Encoder, and then put them directly into your server without additional re-encoding. The videos will look much better, at a lower bit rate.

It's not really that I'm encoding twice on purpose. I am running these through a tube script. Some scripts give me encoding errors, some do not. That's what I'm trying to figure out. About to test on another one shortly.