Perplexing issues in 1.0.5.3: Transcoding error and hard crash

[raybestos]

Well, I decided to finally try CloneBD (1.0.5.3 eval) after having waited around 4-5 years for the product. I must say my experiences have been frustrating to say the least. This seems very kludgy and has lots of eye candy, but where it counts - the guts of the transcoder - drone.libav.exe - leaves me cold. No matter what I do, I can't get a transcoded file.

I get one of the following crashes / errors:

1. The project "encodes" for 1-2 seconds, then says "Your movie has been transcoded." with no error, and a 0-byte file.
2. The program hard crashes immediately after starting to encode for 1-2 seconds.
3. The program aborts and reports: "Internal transcoder error." after attempting to encode for 1-2 seconds.
4. The program goes into an infinite loop, where it reports ETA: "Calculating". Then just stays there until I hard close it through task manager.

Further, I have some very important questions:

1. Why is a Direct X install required at all? Is it really necessary to simply transcode, or is it required for pretty eye-candy features such as Preview, which I wish to completely disable?
2. I'm using Windows XPsp3. It seems to not be supported in light of the above (4) errors / random roullette of crashes I get when attempting to encode. If, as you describe in the system requirements "Windows XP or above", IT SHOULD WORK!
3. No, I don't want to upgrade to bloated Win 8.1 / Win10.

4. Please in all fairness I'm willing to give your program another chance, please advise on where I could be going wrong. Is it a Direct X problem? I got a ".NET framework error" when installing, but the complete install of ClondBD succeeded.

5. The above problems manifest on both of my systems, one with a c2d e8400, the other a laptop with an Atom processor. Both 32-bit systems. Single-threaded. Is this my problem? Is there some "hidden" requirement for either 64-bit code and / or multithreaded execution being mandatory.

If you can not help, I suppose there are other programs better suited to my purposes, ie taking a ~32GB .m2ts file and simply transcoding it down to 23865 MB so it will fit on a SL BD-R. I don't need or want all the bells and whistles. I want the guts to work!

There must be a way to get this working. My demands are not much; don't need fancy menus, subtitles, chapter settings, etc, etc, just a good-quality transcoded file, which I can then use other tools to build into a proper BD-R filestructure!

 

[Ch3vr0n]

Error 1: on the final screen send in the logfile using email option by clicking the left of the 2 blue buttons on top of the error message (if they don't appear, hold the ALT key)
Error 2: define crash. Does the SOFTWARE crash and closes or does the transcoder crash. 2 different things. If option 2, see above, if option one you'll need to send in an app dump
Error 3: see error 1
Error 4: no clue

Q1: because there's certain files in that specific directX version that CloneBD uses (among other reasons for the graph output), that may or may not be on the user' system. As such it gets installed regardless. DirectX only adds files that are missing it does not replace newer versions with older ones
Q2: that's not a question
Q3: Not a question either, but nobody will order you to upgrade, but the least you could do is upgrade to Win7 or so, Microsoft has officially ended long term support for XP years ago and even Windows 7 is off the support list. It only receives security fixes anymore and afaik long term support for Win7 will end mid next year.
Q4: Still not a question. It could be a DirectX problem partially, but DirectX no linked to .NET in any way, completely different software packages
Q5: Doubt your system specs are the problem though they are on the low end yes for blu-ray processing. x264 (the encoder used) is a small application but when fully utilizing system resources puts the system under tremendous load.

 

[Pete]

1. Why is a Direct X install required at all? Is it really necessary to simply transcode, or is it required for pretty eye-candy features such as Preview, which I wish to completely disable?

Certain tasks are optimized by using directx. Scaling and alpha blending are delegated to the GPU via directx.
And then, of course, there is playback (preview player etc...)

2. I'm using Windows XPsp3. It seems to not be supported in light of the above (4) errors / random roullette of crashes I get when attempting to encode. If, as you describe in the system requirements "Windows XP or above", IT SHOULD WORK!

It should be supported - we ourselves are testing XP, too, and it works. But yes, support for XP is the trickiest part, because it simply lacks many features and keeping software compatible with XP is becoming increasingly difficult. Some degree of forensic information like a log file or crash dump at least would be required, to see why you are having trouble.

3. No, I don't want to upgrade to bloated Win 8.1 / Win10.

I totally understand that - Windows 8 is sick and as for Windows 10... I'm reluctant myself after having been put through Windows 8 previously, which was a bad experience.
But as the previous post says: Windows 7 is THE way to go. If you can get your hands on a copy.
Works well, very stable and is actually less "bloated" than Winxp (requires less resources, they did clean up nicely)

4. Please in all fairness I'm willing to give your program another chance, please advise on where I could be going wrong. Is it a Direct X problem? I got a ".NET framework error" when installing, but the complete install of ClondBD succeeded.

.NET? Really?? CloneBD doesn't use that junk anywhere at all - it's all native code. Maybe some other application is interfering.

5. The above problems manifest on both of my systems, one with a c2d e8400, the other a laptop with an Atom processor. Both 32-bit systems. Single-threaded. Is this my problem? Is there some "hidden" requirement for either 64-bit code and / or multithreaded execution being mandatory.

In all honesty - I wouldn't try any Blu-ray conversions with that kind of hardware. Processing will take forever. AVC encoding is an extremely CPU-hungry process.
Still - it should work, there are people using CloneBD under those conditions.

 

[raybestos]

In case (2) above, the program crashes, not the libav encoder. It's still running, and consuming anywhere from 80-90% CPU load. Interestingly, in the cases where I only strip a menu, subtitles, or titles, WITHOUT RE-ENCODING, the program works and creates a proper BD disc structure. In such cases, obviously no transcoding is done, so my problem lies somewhere in the drone.libav.exe process or its dependencies.

I am unable to e-mail you logs through the program (no internet on those machines), so I'll try to manually e-mail a log to you instead.

Yes, I know my system specs are indeed slow. But, as you said XP is supported, I wanted to try on these 'slow' systems first. Perhaps I shall try on my other system, which has an i7 2600k, but I think chances of success are even less there, as it's running Win XP 64 SP1!

I still think my problem may be a DirectX problem. Should I completely uninstall DirectX and reinstall the latest version of DirectX 9 instead? Downloaded from MS, it's almost a 100MB download, very bloated, but if you think it'll fix my problems, I'll go ahead.