What no Xvid - Is Handbrake only for the wealthy

[funkytwig]

So I guess everybody can afford to upgrade there laptops, mine is a Latitude D410 and is not that old butt is not powerful enough to play x264. I also use Xvid at a fairly high bitrate as its a lot quicker to encode. A real shame, I guess I will have to go back to the previous version.

Its a shame in a time of rescission Handbrake is only for the wealthy;)

Ben

[s55]

Its a shame in a time of rescission Handbrake is only for the wealthy

Rubbish. That laptop should easily play HandBrakes vanilla mpeg4 output. It should also play SD h264 pretty easily too. (With the correct software - e.g VLC)

The Mpeg4 encoder is pretty fast in HandBrake. In most cases, it'll be faster than that of Xvid.

[tqh52]

I have always liked xvid for its compatibility with other tools and it's filesize. I like to keep 90 minutes of video under about 1Gb. I have tried my first coversion, it is sitll working on the last second of coversion (and has been for 2 hours) and the file is now just over 2GB. I tend to watch these files on a frontend computer using GeeXBox (on a Celeron 633ish computer with 500MB of RAM). Since this converison has yet to complete, I don't know how well it will it play.
Cheers.

[TedJ]

I have tried my first coversion, it is sitll working on the last second of coversion (and has been for 2 hours) and the file is now just over 2GB.

Wait... if I'm reading that correctly, you're a little over half way through the encode and the file is over 2GB? You didn't increase the quality slider by any chance? If the file goes over 4GB it'll be broken and won't play on anything.

[jkbc]

So I guess everybody can afford to upgrade there laptops, mine is a Latitude D410 and is not that old butt is not powerful enough to play x264. I also use Xvid at a fairly high bitrate as its a lot quicker to encode. A real shame, I guess I will have to go back to the previous version.

Its a shame in a time of rescission Handbrake is only for the wealthy;)

Ben

Something is wrong, as Ted is pointing out. We have similar Dell laptops at work (200+ unit deployment, daily rotations) and they'll handle that sort of thing fine. Fact of the matter is, it doesn't take a whole lot of computing horsepower to display good video these days.

[tqh52]

I just cancelled the conversion. Now over 16 hours (but the command windows still shows less than a second to complete (and has since the first hour) and my file size is up over 8GB. the only change that I made from the normal preset was to enable Forced subtitiles. So far I am not impressed with the upgrade (I had the last version running perfectly); but I will give another conversion a try. I will update as to how that goes. As long as I can play my finished files with MythTv and GeeXbox, and the are not substantially larger at an equal quality; I will be happy.

Most of my conversions with the last version of handbrake were done with the CLI; which was frontended by powershell script that scanned my source directories for files and processed anything that was not already in the destination directory - like a charm. Output was either .avi for GeeXbox for m4v for my ipod.

[funkytwig]

I have tried playing the files using VLC on this box both in Windows and Ubuntu and neither played smoothly. I will try the defaults tonight and see if it plays (I did tweak them). I was using a 1000 bit rate. In terms of speed I it was taking about 4x to encode xvid over x264. As one of the things I use Handbrake for was encoding to upload to YouTube xvid was ideal (as encoding seemed to be quicker and the files were throw away so the size did not matter).

Ben

[mduell]

Did you set the large file option? If not, an output file over 4GB is not going to work.

I wouldn't have to ask you this if you posted an activity log, but alas you chose not to do this after being told to do it.

[eniwetok]

So I guess everybody can afford to upgrade there laptops, mine is a Latitude D410 and is not that old butt is not powerful enough to play x264. I also use Xvid at a fairly high bitrate as its a lot quicker to encode. A real shame, I guess I will have to go back to the previous version.

I, too, think it was a mistake to take XVID and AVI out of HandBrake which is why I'm not sure I'll get the latest version. I have two AVI DVD players and bought three for gifts so I can share video as data disks. Hell, I just got a Canon camera that outputs video to AVI. AVI is not dead.

But if you're interested in XVID... check out AVIDEMUX... http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/ it's a MUCH more capable XVID encoder than Handbrake ever was. You can get lost in the options. It also offers previews and has video filters.

[TedJ]

+1

If Handbrake's implementation of xvid and avi were anywhere near as feature complete as the multitude of competing encoders out there, I could understand the outrage.

[Leo]

I found that having a virus on my laptop limited the video playback capabilities. Everything was running slower than expected, but sometimes even simple videos wouldn't play.

I can play back x264 at 1280x720 with a four year old Dell laptop, 1.7GHz mobile Pentium M with 1GB RAM. Sometimes high bitrate parts stutter at 720p, but at DVD resolution x264 is no problem. Quit any programs you have in the background. Ensure you have plenty free disk space. It may help to create a new user account. Consider backup, format, reinstall Windows.

x264 can produce much smaller files than XviD can for similar quality (e.g. on the AppleTV preset or a high-profile preset). The Apple Universal preset is very limited for compatibility with iPods (no b-frames or CABAC) so files have to be bigger for the same quality. If files are eding up too big for your liking, you simply need to reduce the video quality setting, or reduce the audio (e.g. using only one 160kbps pro-logic AAC track, rather than an additional separate AC3 track on top). If you think the encode may come close to 4GB but you don't want it to go over (e.g. for a FAT32 file system such as most pen drives and many external hard drives, or for device compatibility) I'd encode at 2 pass asking for just under 4GB.

You may find that portable devices that play XviD will play ffmpeg too; I have no idea.

AVI's not quite dead, but it's certainly on its last legs. Even Microsoft moved over ages ago (to .WMV).

If you need really XviD, I guess you'll just have to stick with 0.9.3 or look elsewhere. The HandBrake project is focused on x264 to MP4/MKV.