Video Tutorial: Make FREE h.264 files that look great in Windows XP

Demistate

Demistate

Veteran
I just put together this new tutorial for encoding files into h.264 format, for FREE using MeGUI.

Click this for the tutorial
 There is a downloadable .mp4 sample through the link as well.

This will allow you to output 2pass VBR h.264 files into a universially compatible .mp4 format that is playable in quicktime player, HD-DVD, and anything else that will support h.264. You wont have washed out video like using the quicktime encoder, and it will look loads better at the same bitrates.

Best off, the results are pretty rockin. I have screenshots for compairison.


Late edit: This guide was written a year ago, and now the program has changed drastically. There are many options that aren't even in the same place. You can still try to dive into MeGUI, but its a program for advanced compressionists only. If you want something easier, try Ripbot264
There's also a Guide somone wrote for it. Ripbot is excelent for creating small , very high-quality h.264 files for portibles and handhelds. These files play back on comptuers just as well too.
 
Last edited:
"The application failed to initialize properly (0xc00000135)"

this is the error code i receive when trying to install it..any idea why that happens and how i can work it out?

I already unzipped the files..yes.
 
Alex, i just tried your method and all i can say is thankyou.

I've always had problems going out to quicktime in windows, glitchy pixels, desaturated colours, large file size etc. But i am very impressed with the results using meGUI.

I just tested it with 2 of my videos and there is no comparison. The meGUI version blows the quicktime pro encoded file out of the water. The edges are crisper, theres more detail, the motion seems smoother. And best of all the file size is smaller. I highly recomend you try this people!

It's gonna take ages to re-encode & re-upload my online portfolio, but who cares!!

1 thing that your tutorial doesn't mention though is that you need to have AVI synth 2.5 installed for the method to work. Get it here:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=57023&package_id=72557&release_id=366702

One minor quibble is that comparing the result video file to the original footage in Premiere 2.0 it's still looking a little bit washed out, blacks are a bit lighter etc. Any way to sort this out do you think? apart from darkening/oversaturating the original footage?

I can post the comparisons if you want to see.

cheers.

james.h
 
I just visited your blog, i just saw your tutorial, and despite my respect for what you have done with the program (i hope it will work here once) i really liked your blog..!

Great man, this is the kind of independent Media i love, i just saw "Unnecessary Evil", its very well done (editing/camerawork) and a very good point of topic..!

Ill definitly watch the blog closer now, who knows, maybe i can support you with some report some day...All the best-ben!
 
Thanks for the hint alexander,

i just tryed to install it on my internet pc, so i itll probably work flawless on my editing Pc, which has the 2.0...!

also thanks to James, i will get avisynth too..!

Cant wait to try it, will post back!
 
I dont find the screenshots comparing MeGui with Quicktime very accurate because the quicktime in question used 1 pass CBR and MeGui used 2pass VBR. Is there any way to see the same scene in quicktime compressed with 2pass VBR?
 
sellington said:
I dont find the screenshots comparing MeGui with Quicktime very accurate because the quicktime in question used 1 pass CBR and MeGui used 2pass VBR. Is there any way to see the same scene in quicktime compressed with 2pass VBR?
Click to expand...

Your guess is as good as mine. In my encodings out of P.pro 2.0 that was the best I could get QT to do with h.264. But why would you want to use it when all of your footage will get a gamma bump and look washed out anyway?

How do you do 2pass VBR h.264 with QT Pro?
 
In the export>settings box, click h.264 for the compression type and then under the Low-Med-High slider there is an option for single or multi pass encoding. That's all there is too it. I'm going to try your method later tonight.

I guess I have been lucky, but I never had any gamma problem or anything like that in QT h.264 exports and I am Windows exclusively.
 
Ok, i've been using this method of compression for a few days now and it looks great! However, i have come acoss one problem and that is if i have any titles made in Premiere in my exported timeline then my soundtrack goes out of sync with the video. Anybody care to shed light on why this is happening and how to fix it? I export from Premiere to DV AVI.

cheers.
 
I think what's happening is AVIsynth sees null frames and skips them out of the equation for video, so the sound appears desynched. What you can do to overcome this is to always have motion on each frame (title screens should have a video for a counter or what you can think up).

I'm trying to find out a soultion to work around this (sometimes just videotaping with the iris closed (to get pure black) and putting that as the background will aleviate the problem)
 
cheers demistate, i simply just rendered my titles out to file and re-imported them back in. seems to have done the trick.

here's another question though...can i resize a video to an odd number? I got an error message when i tried before but ideally i need to resize to 720x405, as that's full rez PAL 16x9. It didn't like me using the 405, it said only multiples of 2, but that seems a bit silly to me. Any suggestions?

And also any suggestions on fixing the gamma issue using your method? It's not as bad as when i use quicktime pro to encode my files but there is still a noticable increase in brightness whe comparing it to the footage in the timeline. Any ways in meGUI of fixing this?

thanks again.

james.h
 
Smettli, how does that work because by my maths 724x406 isn't 16x9 ? Would that mean tat you would be sacrificing quality as certain pixels would be getting squashed together?

Your videos always look crystal clear. What method do you use to export them?
 
I seem to remember reading somewhere that all your videos should have dimensions that are multiples of 8, even if you change the aspect ratio slightly.

For example 1080P material encodes better at 1920x1088. I'm pretty sure is a limitation of the software.

Alot of times if your pixes are within 10 of the original aspect ratio, you wont notice a difference.

Also avoid anamorphic resolutions with this free software, If you have 1440x1080, just make it 1920x1088. It can handle anamorphic, but you wont be adding any file size by doing larger resolutions, You still have complete control over the bitrate of the streams.
 
hmm, trying to do it for the first time, but when I analyse the footage, it gives me an error about not having tivct.dll in my plugins folder?
 
Guys, thanks so much for this... but I'm getting error messages: " AVisynth script error: EEDI2: YV12 or YUY2 input required!"

What does this mean and how do I fix? I did of course install avisynth...
 
Last edited:
followup on my previous post:

compressed avi's from premiere pro2 work fine, but uncompressed give me the error messages mentioned in my previous post... starting this process with a compressed file sort of defeats the purpose a bit, no?

Thanks again!
 
Make sure you have all the updates installed. And on my end, it will automatically add a convert RGB-> YUV filter automatically. I'm pretty sure there is a box you can tick to manually add the conversion.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top