LAV Splitter and Windows Movie Maker wierdness.

Hi guys. Since upgrading to the latest K-Lite pack I'm having trouble saving my videos to .wmv in Windows Movie Maker. It renders to about 50-90%, then stops, giving me one of two BS error messages. One tells me I don't have enough memory (though I have 16gigs), and one tells me clips in my project are missing from their original location (which they're absolutely not). Also, when rendering, it opens a crapton of LAV Splitters, which it didn't do before getting the most recent codec pack. I believe it used ffdshow before, and I don't know how to switch it back, and I've made much larger projects at higher resolutions and bitrates before with no problem. What do!?

I'm using WMM 2012 on Windows 7 by the way.

What format do your input files have?

Individual applications can only use up to 4GB of memory. Movie Maker has a bug where it 'leaks' memory and it can actually use that much. A possible workaround that I found online is to define a custom output preset, where the video resolution is the same as that of your input files.

The second error is probably a result of the first one.

Found a useful Youtube video with another solution:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BYFcrvOxDA

All the individual video clips I'm using are .flv's and are in 1080p. My custom output resolution is the same. Also, for some reason, when I cut the movie down to just a few clips and it actually processes the whole thing, the quality looks crappy regardless of how high the bitrate. Another issue I didn't have before upgrading the codec pack. And as for the YouTube video, I've also found it and tried it, it does help the whole movie get processed further, but not quite enough for it to actually finish. If I could just roll back somehow or remove LAV, I won't need to worry about any of these tricks.

Without LAV Splitter you can't open FLV files. ffdshow is an audio/video decoder, not a splitter. If that was used before, it was instead of the LAV decoders.

There is a setting in LAV Splitter that you could try to reduce memory usage:
Set Maximum Queue Packets to 100.
Set Maximum Queue Memory to 16.

I highly doubt the quality issue is because of the codecs from the pack. Those are only used for the decoding. The encoding is done by Movie Maker.

If you open the Windows Task Mamanger (Ctrl+Shift+Esc) then you can monitor the memory usage and see which actions cause it to increase.

Hi there, I've been busy, but I just did what you recommended.

It helped a longer video finish processing, but the finished quality is still crap.

Before Render
After Render
OBS Settings (the software I use for game recording)

The framerate and audio remains great. But it's pixelated like it's been downscaled and then upscaled or something. I'll reiterate the settings as far as resolution, bitrate, and framerate go are the same as the original video, and that this never happened before upgrading the codec pack. It used ffdshow before, and the finished quality was always as good as the original.

You can choose the preferred decoder during installation of the codec pack. But using ffdshow should not give better quality. LAV Video decoder gives full quality decoding. The problem occurs after decoding. So either the render settings are wrong, for example a low bitrate, or Movie Maker is messing up.

What are the encoding settings in Movie Maker?

You can't see or change encoding settings in WMM. Going into the settings only allows you to change microphone and webcam inputs, unfortunately. Though I've never needed to change anything and have been using with default it for years.

So today I've changed several k-lite settings, and even after disabling LAV completely by changing absolutely every thing I could find that uses it to ffdshow or whatever else was available, WMM still continues to use only LAV. Even uninstalling then reinstalling picking only ffdshow, still only uses LAV. Even reinstalled WMM, nothing changed.

It will continue to use the LAV Splitter (white icon). But not the decoders (red = video, blue = audio).

There should be several export options:
http://createvideonotebook.blogspot.com/2013/07/new-export-options-for-windows-live.html

LOL yeah those are just export presets, it's like the first thing you see when you try to save videos in that program. That's the kind of thing you'd point out to someone who's never even seen the program before. 

 

It's better to make custom outputs which actually match the quality of the clips I'm using, which I'm already doing. 

There is no way to open an actual panel with encoding options in WMM.

So which settings are you using for your custom preset?

The export settings define which format it encodes to and which quality settings it uses (bitrate).

Ok in this picture, the window on the left is the custom setting. The window on the right is the original video properties. I've set my bitrates to match or exceed the bitrate of the original video and it's not making any difference at all.

I'm testing out other video formats and it seems to just be doing this for flv's though it's kinda hard to tell as the other videos aren't games. I might try to find a converter to see if that really is the case, though it would really suck because the game footage I have isn't re-doable... if that's a word, and I'd have to convert a couple hours of video. Also, OBS only outputs to flv.

Do MP4 files work correct as input?

AviDemux is a free convertor that also allows you to remux your FLV files to MP4 without re-encoding the audio and video (so just copy and only change the container format). That is very fast.

That did it. It worked great. I wonder why just FLV's won't render properly. But still it's awful I have to re-edit my videos which took hours. Any idea how I can swap the videos in my project?

I don't know where it store the project, but if it is a text file, then you could edit it to replace the filenames.

Ok I got it. I just renamed the copies the same as the originals and swapped them in the folders. I had to dome some simple repair in WMM since they had a new file extension but it worked and the clips remained edited.

It's great, we finally have a workaround! But still, what the hell is WMM's beef with FLV files? I hope it will be fixed some day so I don't have to remux every game recording I want to edit.

Thanks for all your help.

Is the bitrate and filesize of the output file lower than expected when using FLV as input? Since the quality is low, it probably is. It would be interesting to try with a MKV file as input, to see if same problem occurs. You can remux to MKV (Matroska) with AviDemux as well (or with MkvToolnix).

MP4 is a natively supported format in Windows (since v7). So Maybe MM uses a different encoder in that situation (Media Foundation vs DirectShow).

Maybe I will try it out myself when I same some spare time.