Small pieces of video split by ffmpeg are not playing or playing with artifacts

Question

I'm trying to cut a video file into small parts (0.5-5s) and encode these parts to h.264/aac with ffmpeg. I'm using this command:

ffmpeg -i 1.avi -ss 00:05:00 -t 00:00:01,50 -vcodec libx264 -threads 0 -vpre default -acodec libfaac out1.mp4

In VLC, some pieces are playing without video, sound only, other pieces had video artifacts like this:

Maybe I missed some necessary arguments for ffmpeg?

Answer 1

I tried it with FFmpeg version 0.8.5, using an AVI input file just like you.

The following command produced correct results:

ffmpeg -i 1.avi -ss 00:00:05 -t 00:00:01.50 -vcodec libx264 -vpre default -acodec libfaac out1.mp4

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Here are some tips to get it working:

Update to the latest version of FFmpeg.

For Ubuntu, follow the tutorials here. I've been using them myself.

On OS X, install FFmpeg using Homebrew, by calling brew install ffmpeg.

On Windows, just download the precompiled versions.

Use the correct length format.

Note that the duration format is using decimal points, not commas, e.g. hh:mm:ss[.xxx].

Remove the -threads 0 option.

Enabling -threads 0 however gave me the error "nal buffer is too small". I don't even know why they allow a value of zero here, and unless you have a specific reason to do so, I would just leave this argument out. Ideally, it should enable auto-threads in libx264, but there might be a bug I'm not aware of.

Encode without B-pictures.

Depending on the size of the output video, I don't know if libx264 is even able to reliably produce output using B-pictures that reference one or more intra-coded pictures. This might even lead to the artifacts you describe.

You can try to disable B-pictures (or "B-frames") with -bf 0.