Avidemux won't convert AVI file to MPEG?
 

It's been one of those difficult days reading, reading, reading and trying to get things to work. My current issue is getting an mpeg from a Lagarith-based video. I can use AviDemux to create a mpeg for an interlaced video file I created from VirtualDub. But, AviDemux won't accept another file I have that is progressive and below the speed threshold to create a mpeg. I finally found DGPulldown and am trying to get it to work. It is upchucking over the fact that "input file must be an elementary stream, not a program stream"--say what? I haven't found an explanation of what this means and how to fix it. Anyone willing to explain?

Thanks from a tired and grumpy newby,
Steve

An elementary video stream is an encoded video-only file. No audio. Elementary MPEG video streams are usually encoded as .m2v files. There's a lot of paid software that can create .m2v encodes. I don't know how you would do it with freebies. There must be plenty of forum readers around who use the free stuff. I should think AviDemux can do it. I also saw where Avidemux can apply 3:2 pulldown.

You didn't read enough yet. :laugh:

One of my favorites quips, especially to "I read it and didn't understand it", is to read it again. That's how I learn about the MPEG format, back when documentation was scarce. Some of the earlier manuals, especially Final Cut Pro, was heavy jargon. So I read it over and over until I did make sense.

What are you trying to do? :huh1:

It's not just Avidemux, but formats and codecs have very specific allowances. Some software is smarter about this, and will refuse to let you do something wrong. And that may be the case here.

Perhaps the O.P). refers to old 16mm film transfers. When de-telecined and de-duped for cleanup and filtering (some of the transfers posted look terrible) the video comes out as 15fps progressive. The kind of rudimentary "pulldown" that the transfer shop used was to insert duplicate frames in uneven increments (or sometimes 3 dupes) along with an uneven pattern of occasional single and even doubled "telecine" frames, which made a jerky, jumpy mess of things.

No one that I know offers a pulldown or dupe-frame method of cleanly speeding up 15fps video to 29.97 NTSC. What one can do (which is what I did) was in one case to output a square-pixel 15fps video as mp4, which would be playable on a PC and on most external players. For a DVD version, I used Avisynth to output an avi at 17.98 film speed. TMPGenc allowed me to encode that to MPEG2 as an m2v file, but you could probably do it with the free HCenc encoder. I then fed the 17.98fps m2v to DGPulldown, then "lied" to DGPulldown and told it the real fps was 19.98 (which is DGPulldown's low-speed limit), and DGPulldown modified that with headers for pulldown that resulted in 29.97fps playback for DVD. So the resulting DVD plays a little fast but looked OK and didn't jerk around all over the screen. I later discovered that TMPGEnc Plus 2.5 would allow me to encode an MPEG2 .m2v at 15fps.

I'm guessing this is why DGPulldown is needed.