Do not use MeGUI

[Kovensky]

That is all.

[Thesis]

Indeed, making a whole new section just for this is worth. 

[RiCON]

How about as a GUI batch encoder?

[JEEB]

How about as a GUI batch encoder?

As long as it'd stay up-to-date and the settings dialog was good enough you could use it. Otherwise you could just make some magic with batch scripts or shellscripts and be happy with that.

Hint: Currently AFAIK it keeps somewhat up-to-date, and the settings dialog did get better (if I remember correctly)... But it came after quite some time of well... "nothing".

[BigDid]

That is all.

Would you mind to elaborate?

From a newbie point of view, why not use this encoding GUI? ...

Did

PS: I will elaborate about the newbie point of view in the ... newbie section  

[atavarius]

Would you mind to elaborate?

From a newbie point of view, why not use this encoding GUI? ...

Did

PS: I will elaborate about the newbie point of view in the ... newbie section  

Its out of date, no longer uses the latest x264 builds properly, and seems to have been abandoned by its developers. StxRip, Ripbot, and various other GUIs are easier to use and are actively maintained. Honestly, a GUI is barely needed anymore, with the addition of the preset system in x264 command line encoding can't get much easier.

[JEEB]

Would you mind to elaborate?

From a newbie point of view, why not use this encoding GUI? ...

First of all, although it does contain lots of useful Avisynth plugins/filters and overall applications in its autoupdate, this piece of software has certainly had its own share of feature creep and small things that make it even somewhat harder to use than the original applications that it uses behind-the-scenes (compare dgindex / mkvmergegui to the features that MeGUI represents of them). The whole doing-stuff-in-a-batch idea is not bad, not bad at all, but all kinds of things went loose with this GUI.

And one of them was the fact that the "stable" update servers for MeGUI went pretty much dead of any updates for quite some time, at a time when x264 did get some miscompilations fixed and all kinds of useful features added. And when they started re-updating their system the damage was already done -- and the best thing is, I'd guess many people still use the last versions of stuff from the last "stable" update (which would be more than half a year old), just because they do not know that they should update their URLs or switch to "development / unstable" branch for updates.

Another thing was the amount of bugs in things. MeGUI, while having interesting features, did have some famous bugs such as the "This is video is not YV12"-loop or random failures at creating chapters and other features (which I thankfully didn't really seem to use, leading me to a somewhat positive opinion on the application).

What I did like, though, was the fact that at least MeGUI's MP4 muxer read the framerate from the raw H.264 stream, instead of just making the user input it every time. I know that in some cases the framerate in the stream isn't the right one -- but this was a very nice helper.

[Yoshiyuki Blade]

Yep, you've pretty much covered the major reason, which is the lack of updates from the from the default servers it uses, and the program itself. So it makes helping others more difficult if they're not on the same page as the latest and greatest of x264 .

[[Gilgamesh]]

Another reason: x264 presets and tuning system is very easy to use, there's no need for bloated GUIs anymore, IMO.

[Thesis]

Another reason: x264 presets and tuning system is very easy to use, there's no need for bloated GUIs anymore, IMO.

Same here, I guess that's pretty much the best reason. Nevertheless, megui is just too buggy now.

[Assassinator]

And one of them was the fact that the "stable" update servers for MeGUI went pretty much dead of any updates for quite some time, at a time when x264 did get some miscompilations fixed and all kinds of useful features added. And when they started re-updating their system the damage was already done -- and the best thing is, I'd guess many people still use the last versions of stuff from the last "stable" update (which would be more than half a year old), just because they do not know that they should update their URLs or switch to "development / unstable" branch for updates.

And even if you do use the development branch for updates, supposedly (from what I heard, I don't use MeGUI anymore), the latest update will screw over all your profiles leading you to a whole stack of errors on the next load and no working x264 profiles.

Another thing was the amount of bugs in things. MeGUI, while having interesting features, did have some famous bugs such as the "This is video is not YV12"-loop or random failures at creating chapters and other features (which I thankfully didn't really seem to use, leading me to a somewhat positive opinion on the application).

From what I remember of it when I still used it (a long time ago), it has an annoying audio bug where in the channel settings, if you use anything other than "keep original channels", it'll normalize your audio even if you set it not to.  Also remember crashes when loading avs scripts with certain filtering, and also various bugs to do with the profile system.

How about as a GUI batch encoder?

... Otherwise you could just make some magic with batch scripts or shellscripts and be happy with that.

Yeah, that.  Wrote myself a batch script for that purpose, can set up conversions for a whole series (say 24 episodes), including batch filtering (eg. resize, since I encode for PSP), in 15 seconds.  Meh, works great for my purposes, I'm happy.

Another reason: x264 presets and tuning system is very easy to use, there's no need for bloated GUIs anymore, IMO.

You must realize a lot of the user base are beginners, and they probably need it for the audio encoding, filtering (auto crop/deinterlace/IVTC?) and muxing too.  Tell them to write an avs script themselves, and they'll be like "errr... avs script?"  So a GUI is still definitely needed.

[Yoshiyuki Blade]

Another reason: x264 presets and tuning system is very easy to use, there's no need for bloated GUIs anymore, IMO.

Though bloated is certainly never a good thing, an intuitive GUI would still be really nice to have too. One whose design adheres to the encoder's guidelines if it's coherent enough. x264's guidelines happen to be very coherent, but not too many GUI's seem to follow suit.

[Kurtnoise]

this is a trolling thread ?

[Bachstelze]

I use it for audio encoding and for the bitrate calculator. Also AutoUpdate to avoid lurking the Net to download all the tools because I'm lazy.

[[Gilgamesh]]

You must realize a lot of the user base are beginners, and they probably need it for the audio encoding, filtering (auto crop/deinterlace/IVTC?) and muxing too.  Tell them to write an avs script themselves, and they'll be like "errr... avs script?"  So a GUI is still definitely needed.

I disagree with this point, as much as there are a lot of beginners, there's enough documentation to learn how to properly do something too (avisynth's own wiki, for example), and there are forums like this one for them to ask how to do something assuming they're having trouble following said documentation. People should spend at least a bit of effort and time on trying to learn how to do something to fit their tastes, although sometimes I think I'm asking too much with that.

And, well, I meant MeGUI with my last post, I gues I should had phrased it better.

[sumawo13]

this is a trolling thread ?

I can't really tell. MeGUI was my GUI of choice until it stopped getting updates, now I don't know what to use.

[JEEB]

this is a trolling thread ?

By all means no - the current situation has just led to MeGUI being a suboptimal selection for an encoding GUI. When or if it will get better, this thread will go away methinks. Also, thanks for the mp4box builds :3

[Kurtnoise]

well...I posted this question to respond to Kovensky's post. There is a current update in the D9 forum...so, you're free to use is or not.

but the *real* question is : does this board support/recommend a GUI for x264 or not ? I really don't care personally.

I recall that there was a GUI in the x264 sources...but this has been removed.

[JEEB]

well...I posted this question to respond to Kovensky's post. There is a current update in the D9 forum...so, you're free to use is or not.

but the *real* question is : does this board support/recommend a GUI for x264 or not ?

This section is on this forum, which already means something, methinks.

I think this thread is just a culmination of all the questions / problems people have come up when confronted with a person who had been using an old version of MeGUI. It might come up as something personal, but I don't really think it's that. It's just that currently "MeGUI isn't recommended".

I'll take a look at the patched MeGUI project then, of course it's a good thing that people are trying to make the application better than it used to be

[Forteen88]

@Kurtnoise: Thanks for MeGUI, but why don't you update the programs for MeGUI-update?
At http://megui.org/auto/ and
http://megui.org/auto/stable/
there are old x264, mkvtoolnix etc.
And I hope the presets in MeGUI version 0.3.1.1057 are fixed by now.

EDIT: Never mind, the updated MeGUI-version by Zathor seems to be good.

[qyot27]

Also AutoUpdate to avoid lurking the Net to download all the tools because I'm lazy.

This, at least partially.  For those tools I don't update through compiling myself (x264 and ffmpeg) or grabbing from RareWares (lame, flac, faad2, one or two others) or Sherpya (mplayer and mencoder), it is useful to draw from as a baseline.  I also generally use many of the tool subfolders as PATH points, rather than throwing them in C:\WINDOWS or some other folder.

I never used MeGUI for anything else except video encoding, and I'd switched to using batch scripts long before the issues with the update servers happened.

The thing I do think was useful were the tooltips.  Sure, there's the wiki that explains them, but you don't always have access to that.  I actually still prefer to have the whole breadth of options before me than to use a preset.  I do normally use the CLI for encoding anything now, but having a GUI that lays everything out there certainly isn't a bad thing to have (and this has always been a complaint I've heard about MeGUI - my response had always been if you don't like seeing all the options, use a different GUI, there are plenty of them).

[Coki]

well...I posted this question to respond to Kovensky's post. There is a current update in the D9 forum...so, you're free to use is or not.

but the *real* question is : does this board support/recommend a GUI for x264 or not ? I really don't care personally.

I recall that there was a GUI in the x264 sources...but this has been removed.

I think the *real* question is : Why doesn't anyone give us any idea of why it was so abruptly abandoned.
Not 1 single letter.....

[Kurtnoise]

I think the *real* question is : Why doesn't anyone give us any idea of why it was so abruptly abandoned.
Not 1 single letter.....

for me :
- No more free time.
- I'm moving to a new job.
- I'm getting father.
- Tired to fix bugs.
- No more interests in Winforms development.



So, it's time to close this thread now imo....where is Mister 2 neurons ? 

If you have some ideas to create a new/choose_your_prefered_word_here GUI, open a new thread.

[Dark Shikari]

Thread has become pretty much useless.