Hi all, I already sent a message to this list, but it didn't show up on the archive, so I'm sending it again. I apogolize if it _did_ get through, but I have some additional problems that I hadn't mentioned in the original mail.
First things first: I'm using transcode 1.0.4, and these problems occured with both the x86-64 packman openSUSE 10.3 build as well as with a self-compiled version. I also tried 1.0.5, with no difference. Alright, on to the actual problems. This could get a little long, but I think it is necessary in order to understand what I want to do but cannot. This is also necessary because there are no errors. I have here a lot of raw interlaced video streams in packed YUY2 format that I need to encode and render both some text and a transparent png image into it. _In theory_, transcode could handle all that in just one run. In practice, it produces garbage output. I've spent a lot of time sequencing these steps and using other video processing tools (mainly mencoder) to do steps where transcode failed, so I am able to pinpoint pretty much exactly what doesn't work. The first thing is: the yuy2toyv12 filter (which is actually misspelled as yuy2tov12 in the manpage) produces garbage video when added. If needed, I could provide sample pictures of the output. Because of that, I used mencoder with a -vf scale,format=yv12, which runs smoothly and produces correct output (at this point, I'm also cropping the video to remove black borders. I believe transcode can do that, too, but mencoders crop filter is simpler to understand ;) ). So now I had video that transcode can cope with and all would be fine. But no, the next problem is the logo filter. It will _not_ handle alphatransparent png images correctly. With the original logo that I used it simply rendered only a fraction of the image. After I've tried changing the logo, and ended up refining it, it won't be blended into the video at all. No trace of it. GIF works, but is absolutely not an option. So now it gets really ugly. I had to export it frame-per-frame, then composite the logo onto every image using imagemagick (which is all done by a script, of course), and then import it again and re-create the video. Since this would result in an upsidedown, red-blue-swapped video, I added -z -k. Except, now the -k switch produces garbage. And not only that, importing the audiostream will not really work either. transcode will speed up the sound (the video is using 30fps), probably on the ground that it's for 25fps video or something. I've fiddled around with some fps switches, got no real results. Which means I have to merge the audio stream into the video using avimerge (_yet_ another step). To correct the colors I then went on to to use mencoder with -vf rgb2bgr=swap,scale,format=yv12 (to get rid of that whole RGB-stuff altogether again), and then finally encoded the video to xvid. The result is all fine, and I could probably cut one step by using mencoder to encode it, but still - this script takes about 80 minutes to produce acceptable results for, if you'll excuse me, a friggin' 2 minute video. transcode is usually a great tool. It can do stuff others can't, but in that case, precisely the reasons I need it for are producing garbage. So, I really hope some of the developers will read all of this. If you need any more information, I'll be glad to provide these. Regards, Toni
