AVI-Mux GUI

AVI-Mux GUI
Current version: 1.17.7

Alexander Noé
2007-01-24

FAQ

on v.1.17.7

Sections

Definitions
Download
Upload
Features
Online manual
Quickstart
Version-History

Windows 9x/ME

AVI-Mux GUI is using UTF-8 internally and Windows 9x/ME is no longer supported! Please use Windows 2000/XP. Although I didn't try, AVI-Mux GUI is supposed to work on Windows 2003 as well.

Windows Vista

I got word that AVI-Mux GUI works on Vista only when using the XP compatibility mode. Considering that the main reason for Vista is more Digital Restrictions Management, I do not plan to install Vista, and even less do I plan to look into this issue. I wouldn't even look into this if it didn't run on Vista at all.

Features

supported input file types: AVI, MKV WAV, MPA/MP3, AC3, DTS, AAC, OGG/Vorbis SRT, SSA	All file format readers have been rewritten from scratch and do not depend on bugs of 3rd party parsers
supported output formats: AVI, MKV raw (MPx, AC3, DTS...) ATDS-AAC, OGG/Vorbis	the AVI, MKV and OGG muxers does not depend on any third party bugs either (ADTS is too simple to speak about a "muxer")
supports Open-DML AVI files	No size limitation for AVI files (note: this breaks many hardware MPEG4 players)
supports creating rec list	Forces Microsoft's AVI Splitter to read AVI files sequentially, without seeking on the disc (note: this breaks many hardware MPEG4 players)
easy splitting	Split large files by size, by time or by chapter boundary. See here for more information.
handles MPx/AAC-in-AVI	You can use MPx, AAC and HE-AAC audio in your AVI files. Those files are 100% compliant to the AVI file specification
extracting most stream types	All stream types that can be extracted in "raw mode", like MP3, AC3, DTS, as well as AAC and OGG/Vorbis streams can be extracted from source AVI/MKV files. SRT and SSA subtitles can be extracted from AVI files.
own cache	An own cache increases performance over using the Windows file cache
repair files	Some typical bugs in AVI files causing by some known applications can be fixed without remuxing the file
Mode 2 - Form 2 reading	Files which are stored on CDs using the Mode 2 - Form 2 - format, or files which someone copied from such a CD using Windows Explorer, can be accessed directly
Vorbis-in-AVI reading	AVI files containing Vorbis audio in a way compatible to what ffmpeg does can be used as data source. Note that writing such files is not yet possible in AVI-Mux GUI.
join AVI/MKV files with SSA subtitles	This works even when the SSA style definitions of the source files collide: AVI-Mux GUI will recreate them.
real file type identification	AVI-Mux GUI doesn't care about the file name when identifying a file type, so it cannot be fooled by people who rename MKV, or, even worse, OGM files, to .AVI just to get more hits on eMule

note:

replaying subtitles in AVI/MKV files requires VSFilter 2.27 or newer
if you want to use HE-AAC inside ADTS-packaged AAC files, rightclick on the imported stream and select 'SBR'
a lot of functions are available via right-click.

Quickstart

Add all source files you need
select video source file (or files, if you want to concatenate several AVI files to one) and click "generate data source"
select all audio streams you want to include
start

Download

v1.17.7 - binary	2006/08/08	543 kB	This does not introduce new features compared to 1.17.6. It is a pure bugfix release. If you are upgrading from 1.17.5 or ealier, you must delete the gui.amg.xml file!
v1.17.7 - source code	2006/08/08	597 kB	Note that this is only tested on Visual Studio 2003. It does not work on Visual Studio 6 anymore and should also work on Visual Studio 2005
manual	2006/08/20	276 kB	Complete manual for AVI-Mux GUI, based on v1.17.6
manifest file	2006/04/08	1 kB	I have not made this file
DTS-in-AVI filter	-	-	filter required for replay of DTS streams additionally to a DTS decode filter (such as an appropriate version of WinDVD!)
simplified chinese by "LordFox" (-> link)	2006/08/31	12 kB	To install new language files, copy the file to the language folder of AVI-Mux GUI and add an entry for it in the languages.amg file
Spanish language file	2007/01/24	17 kB	see above for installation

Old downloads:

v1.17.6 - binary	2006/05/28	542 kB	If you are upgrading from 1.17.5 or ealier, you must delete the gui.amg.xml file!
v1.17.6 - source code	2006/05/28	595 kB	Note that this is only tested on Visual Studio 2003. It does not work on Visual Studio 6 anymore and should also work on Visual Studio 2005
v1.17.5 - binary	2006/04/07	528 kB	-
v1.17.5 - source	2006/04/07	575 kB	-
v1.16.11 - binary	2006/04/07	377 kB	-
v1.16.11 - source	2006/04/07	428 kB	-

Separate language files:

Hungarian language file (made by Laszlo Koncz)
Italian language file

Note: If you want to install language files, you have to edit the languages.amg file in AVI-Mux GUI's folder: change the number of languages installed (number=...) and add the file to the list beneath.

Upload

If you have a file that doesn't work in AVI-Mux GUI, I usually need that file in order to be able to reproduce and fix the problem. You can upload files via FTP on ftp://alexnoe.dyndns.org, user "upload", password "only". This account has write, append and create folder permissions, but it does NOT include read or delete permission. If you can create small samples files causing the issue you want to bring to my attention, I prefer those instead of 2GB files, but if not, you can also upload large files.

Online manual

Further information

Open-DML - 10 years old but still unknown to lots of people
How to estimate overhead for AVI, MKV and OGM files before muxing
Scripts in AVI-Mux GUI
Myths vs Truths - a comprehensive list allowing you to easily identify trolls
Comparison of overhead of different containers for a few typical files
making working subtitle files

Bugs that have recently been found and brought to my attention

last updated on October 14, 2007

Visual bug: When exiting AVI-Mux GUI with a maximized window, the size will be stored, but not the maximized state. This will be fixed in the next version.
Crash: I received an AAC file that made the SRT identifier crash during file type identification. The problem will be fixed in the next version.
AVI AC3/DTS audio: The channel number did not take the low frequency effects channel into account. This does not matter for playback in any player I know of, however, Nero Recode verifies the number in the header against the bitstream and complains. The problem will be fixed in the next version.
Cropped settings window: This is #7 in the FAQ. The next version will simply check if the right bottom border of the Cancel button is visible, and, if not, extend the window.
Matroska files with segment tags crashed the reader because the situation where no TagTarget was found wasn't caught. The user who found this issue sent the patch along with the phenomenon report :)
DTS audio with unexpected frame sizes is muxed out of sync. AVI-Mux GUI determines the frame duration by framesize/bitrate instead of using the frame duration field in the header (how could I miss that one??)

other known bugs/problems/limitations

"MPEG 2.5"-MP3 files are not supported
cannot read AVI files where the first stream is not video
AVI files can only be concatenated if video and audio stream within each file has the same length. At the moment I don't have any idea how to fix it reasonably. This problem does NOT occur when selecting MKV as output format.
Don't try to open AC3-/MP3-files directly from a Mode 2 Form 2 - CD. The file size is padded to the next multiple of 2324, therefore the end of such files would be corrupt. AVI files are also padded, but they aren't corrupted by this.
DV-AVIs can't be stored correctly
Vorbis audio cannot be muxed into AVI, even though AVI is capable of holding Vorbis
Opening Mode 2 Form 2 - AVI files sometimes causes AVI-Mux GUI to crash: In this case the index hasn't been read properly. Solution: lower reading speed, use a better drive, spin up the disc before opening the file in AVI-Mux GUI.
Do not combine MP3 mono and MP3 stereo streams within one file. The output will not replay in DirectShow.
The day only has 24 hours, which is not enough....

known bugs of 3rd party stuff

ABC AVI Tag Editor does only have very limited support for AVI files and won't handle most files, for example it won't handle Open-DML files
GSpot has similar issues with Open-DML AVI files
Hardware MPEG4 players with AVI support usually reject Open-DML as well as rec-Lists (for example KISS), and many of them even reject more than one audio stream in a file
Created multipart files which contain MP3-VBR audio can't be concatenated in NanDub. AVI-Mux GUI creates, unlike NanDub, headers which contain the true average bitrate of each stream in each file, so they slightly differ for mp3-vbr streams. It's a NanDub bug that it can't concatenate these, not an AVI-Mux GUI bug.
Windows MediaPlayer replays all audio streams simultaneously. This is normal. WMP does not support AVI files, don't use it.

Requests I have not implemented

writing progress/protocol to stdout: Some internal code that is also used in mkvverify writes more than enough to stdout, writing the protocol to stdout as well would be rather useless and require the 'reader' to separate the different kinds of gibberish
OGM reading: It kinda seems that I won't get around this, but still, don't rely on it anytime soon. Simply don't create OGM files...or use MKVMerge for remuxing.
AVC reading: Read support for RAW AVC streams will not be added because the complexity is incompatble with the about of time I can currently spend on AVI-Mux GUI. If you create AVC video streams, simply use .MKV output format in the encoder
MP4 reading: I simply don't have time add support for another container at the moment. Fixing bugs has priority.

Version History

Version 1.17.7
- fixed bugs
  - 1.17.6 didn't allow raw video stream extraction due to a missing change after a modification in the GUI
  - reading multisegment matroska files was broken in 1.17.6
  - Muxing an AVI file had higher CPU load when showing the progress view
  - There was a problem in the SSA parser leading to a crash when some attributes simply didn't exist
  - A problem introduced with 1.17.6 causes a crash when opening WAV files. This was introduced when adding file highlighting in the source file list
  - Video stream names were ignored for AVI files
  - MP3 files with garbage at the beginning were never detected as CBR
  - Joining NanDub-made AVI files with b0rky AC3 streams didn't work
Version 1.17.6
- new
  - separate output thread when muxing
  - highlighting for files in the source file list
  - use PgUp/PgDn buttons to move files and streams
  - hex viewer for EBML/RIFF tree
  - can choose default file name
- fixed bugs
  - video stream default flag was ignored and always set
  - after deleting files from the source file list, adding new files didn't work
  - after starting to mux from a matroska source, the ebml tree of that file could not be built anymore (critical section handling bug)
  - CLOSEAPP script command didn't work anymore in .5
  - when restarting a muxing job, OGG/Vorbis source files were not reinitialized
  - when using Vorbis audio sources, the large CodecPrivate wasn't taken into consideration when guessing the required header space. With auto cue size enabled, this could lead to a lockup when trying to finalize a matroska output file
  - fixed another bug in the read-ahead mechanism
Version 1.17.5
- new
  - can set video stream name and language code (only MKV output!)
  - got rid of separate video stream window
  - simply use double-click to generate stream sources from one file
  - more windows, especially the main window, are resizeable
  - reasonable TAB order in chapter editor
  - RIFF Tree window now builds the tree in a separate thread and doesn't stall anymore
  - -stdin parameter when launching the application makes it read a script file from stdin (might b0rk with UTF-8 files!)
  - deletes files instead of directly overwriting them, hopefully this fixes the problem that some virus scanners b0rked AVI-Mux GUI.
- fixed bugs
  - saving a configuration now results in a script file that can restore weird file and stream orders
  - chapter editor allowed to type a title before defining the first language code for an edition
  - LOAD command in scripts can now also load files over network folders using \\server\share\blah
  - very small timecode scales in combination with out-of-temporal-order video frames resulted in a bad file because a 'backstep' by more than -30ku relative to the cluster start wasn't caught
  - accidently discarded the first cuepoint (does not affect playability of files)
  - fixed bug that caused a frame to be dropped when the first video cuepoint didn't point somewhere into the first cluster
  - file size and disk space warnings should now only occur when they are supposed to
  - AVI overhead estimation for low overhead mode was wrong
  - AVI-Mux GUI crashed when trying to mux audio and subtitles with no video
  - cache class is completely rewritten and should work now, so that overlapped unbuffered writing is available now
  - flaky behaviour of EBML tree should no longer occur when multiple elements are expanded at once
  - Should no longer hang when trying to launch a muxing job a second time (happened in some cases due to a bug in the cache).
  - fixed bug that could make the video information window crash
  - fixed bug which caused a crash when loading large XML files
  - fixed a memory allocation bug that could crash the chapter editor
  - fixed bug that caused laced vorbis streams in matroska files to be remuxed incorrectly
  - fixed splitting MKA files by something else than size
Version 1.17.4
- new
  - support for header striping (reading and writing) to decrease overhead
  - chapter editor, video information window and ebml tree are now resizeable
  - support for SimpleBlocks, see Matroska v2 (reading and writing)
  - can handle A_AAC codec id (can be used instead of A_AAC/MPEGx/blah[/SBR], should not matter to most users)
  - segment title is now an unicode edit field
- fixed bugs
  - crash when closing multisegment input file
  - several reasons for the chapter editor to crash
  - couldn't read matroska files with stuff between clusters
  - video information window crashed when opening files with lots of chapters lots of times
  - AAC-in-AVI didn't work properly when a delay was applied
  - crash on SMI file due to improper file type check
  - fixed idiotic "lc-acc (he)" display
  - minor fixes to tab order and gui layout
Version 1.17.3 (bugfix release)
- bugs
  - fixed: bug in 1.17.2 that caused MKC file creating not to work properly
  - fixed: bug in cache causing AVI-Mux GUI to hang in some cases when a muxing process was started a second time (i've been looking for this one for more than a year)
  - fixed: minor fixes to user interface
Version 1.17.2
- new
  - added more control over Cues creation for MKV output
  - added some more drag&drop to the chapter editor
  - creation of random uids now uses Windows' CryptAPI instead of rand()
  - added mkvmerge-compatible xml file output
  - added hard-linking for matroska output
- bugs
  - fixed: bug in 1.17.1 causing some Non-Cluster Level 1 Matroska elements not to be indexed
  - fixed: when splitting matroska files and using ordered editions, the result had weird chaptering
  - fixed: muxing WAV to MKV resulted in b0rked files when the format was not handled natively
  - fixed: could not launch AVI-Mux GUI from a directory containing non-ASCII characters
  - fixed: problem with SSA files with weird usage of whitespaces in the headers
  - fixed: added a nonsense dropped frame when joining MKV
Version 1.17.1
- new
  - added mp1 and mp2 muxing to AVI files (only CBR)
- bugs
  - fixed: after muxing an AVI file, opening an AVI file sometimes caused a crash (thanks to Martin Tofall for locating the bug in the source code)
  - fixed: "overwritedlg 0" option in scripting got broken in 1.17
  - fixed: 1.17 could not read mkv files without cues
  - fixed: some save-as dialogs were still calling the old dialog and did thus not work with unicode filenames
  - fixed: EBML tree viewer does no longer malfunction with files with undefined segment size
  - fixed: 1.17 generated bad stream names from audio files containing non-ascii characters
  - fixed: when joining audio-only files, weird chaptering was created. This problem was introduced when adding support for editions
Version 1.17
- new
  - added read support for FFMPEG's Vorbis-in-AVI files
  - added some CRC check for matroska files
  - added support for Editions (allows to define "playlists" of chapters) and for Medium Linking (no soft-linking yet). See here for more information
  - added support for AVI files with JUNK before the headers (reading and writing).
  - added support for Unicode file names
  - added support for Matroska's PixelCrop - elements. See resolution settings
  - When manually changing the AVI frame rate, you can use a format like 30000/1001.
  - numbering for multi part files has been changed. See here
  - space to be reserved for headers of matroska files at the beginning of the file is configurable now
  - opening large Matroska files is faster as parsing Cues is postponed to "when necessary" (calling File Information on very large files with subtitles, but with no Cues for subtitles, will cause Cue parsing!)
- bugs
  - fixed bug causing old style AVI files with rec lists to have bad index entries for rec lists (should not cause playback issues)
  - fixed bug causing a bad delay to be applied for MP3 streams with MP3-VBR interleave != 1
  - fixed bug in the cache which caused random crashes or b0rked audio/video data when trying to launch a muxing process a 2nd time
  - fixed bug which sometimes allowed to select Low Overhead mode even when the Legacy Index was enabled for Open-DML AVI output
  - fixed bug causing crash when trying to save a chapter file in XML format to a file that could not be opened for writing
  - fixed bug causing matroska files containing no tracks (e.g. chapter-only files) not to be accepted
  - fixed bug causing bad CRC32 values to be written sometimes
  - fixed bug causing ChapterUIDs/TrackUIDs between 33 and 64 bits not to be handled properly
  - fixed bug causing SSA files containing empty lines between 2 Event elements not being read
  - fixed bug causing SRT files with lines that contained only spaces not to be read
  - fixed bug causing bad delay to be applied to audio streams when reading audio from MKV files
  - fixed bug causing OGM files to be mistaken as OGG/Vorbis files
  - fixed bug causing file titles being written to AVI files in UTF-8 encoding (MKV uses UTF-8, AVI has to use ASCII)
  - fixed bug causing some XML chapter files to be rejected
  - fixed bug causing stream titles and language codes not to be read from vorbis-in-mkv sources
older ones

Note: The source code for the crc check of Mode 2 Form 2 - source files was taken from the source code of the Mode2CDMaker.

AVI-Mux GUI is released under the terms of the GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE.

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