rungabic

Hi Lin & others... Just wanted to report back that I had at least some success with this. Thinking about the idea of a resource issue, it occurred to me that all my photos were 12 MP, and here I was trying to generate a 1920x1080 video. Since I had zoomed in 118% on most of my slides in order to fill a 16:9 frame, I batch resized my photos to be 2265x1504. Lo and behold -- the resulting 2-pass, max bitrate video worked! Clearly, there was no particular photo or audio file that was borking the video, but simply reducing the overall data size of the entire project did the trick. Interestingly, the max "24000" bitrate file was reported by my various players as peaking far higher than that, and I wish I knew what the setting really meant. Now, the other part of my goal was to be using the 7.0 beta to append a brief HD video clip to the end of my show. Unfortunately, while I can build an h264 video file of just that video file alone, when I append it to the show, then my resulting video again quits halfway or 2/3 of the way through. Once again, there appears to be a "resource issue" and/or the software simply isn't doing a good job of managing too much data, particularly since it seems to be able to handle one-pass, 10000 bitrate, but craps out on 2-pass, max bitrate. However, until I'm able replicate these issues on a different computer, I suppose I shouldn't point the finger... Brent

John -- you're right, but I think that's either a bug or a feature of the interface. When I first saw the bitrate selection field, it looked really weird to me -- because it defaults to 10,000 and maxes out at 24,000. I thought "where are the rest of the zeroes," and so I just assumed the max corresponds to "24Mbps." I wish it were that simple. Brent

Hi Brent, Understood.... I wish there were an easy solution, but right now perhaps the easiest and quickest way would be to zip up the PTE file and post it and several of us could try to create the two-pass 24,000 bitrate run. If you don't find an answer, then we can always do that to sort it out. Best regards, Lin Thanks for your help, Lin. I agree with everything you said. And if it's a resource issue, then trying this on another system would be a good idea (an one I just can't do at the moment, as my other system is temporarily down). I appreciate your offer to test it. Let me poke around a little more and see what I can do first in terms of ruling things out. The killer is that on my current system, which is a few years old, it takes over 2.5 hours to do the two-pas 24000 run...so the process of trying different variables is excruciatingly time-consuming, painful, and frustrating... Brent

Lin -- I'm pretty sure I had the same issues with a completely different (yet approximately equally as long) slideshow, but I'll certainly check into your idea. However, would a "bad" image or sound file cause it to fail a single-pass 24000 bitrate run, yet work in a single-pass 10000 bitrate run? I can't really figure out how that could be... Brent

Not sure what page you're referring to, but I'll try to look. Anyway, I appreciate you're doing that test, but as I said, I did that too: when I deleted all but a tiny handful of slides, I was able to produce a two-pass 24000 bitrate file, which played fine in all of my players. But when I use those same settings with a 225-slide show, then resultant video file stops playback approximately halfway through...

I'm not sure where those recommendations are -- maybe you can point me to them -- I'd be happy to take a look. Regardless, if VideoBuilder is producing a good h264 mp4, it really shouldn't matter what one uses for playback -- I mean, we all know that certain players play certain filetypes and codecs better than others, but when 3 different players end playback halfway through, there's something wrong with that file. And of course, when the file is 0 bytes, after VideoBuilder reports a successful completion, no player's going to play that! ;-) Anyway, I tried playback with VLC, WMP 12, and ArcSoft TMT 5...all with identical behavior. That's enough to convince me that the files VideoBuilder is producing (when it manages to produce them) are well and truly borked. Brent

Hi Peter, Simply because, as I certainly have the horsepower and then some to play back an h264 file at a 24000 bit rate, and my final destination is projection on a 92-inch screen, I'd like to go for absolute maximum quality, even if it's only a matter of a few extra percent. So am I the only one with this problem? Coincidentally, I've also tried to output to AVI, using a multitude of different codecs, and those have all failed miserably as well. Frankly, my "gut" impression is that PicturesToExe is solid and reliable, but VideoBuilder and AVI creation both seem to be somewhat half-baked to me. But I'm hopeful that someone can prove me wrong! Thanks, Brent

I never have had any problems at all generating .exe's, and now for the very first time, I need to make an HD .mp4 out of my slideshow. Without fail, I can successfully generate an .mp4 at the standard preset "HD (1920 x 1080) High Quality" setting. It works, and the resulting file plays fine. However, if I customize the output to do single pass at 24000 bit rate, it completes the process, but the resulting file quits playing (in all 3 software players I've tried) just about halfway through the file. The file size, however, looks to be just as big as it should be. And if I customize the output to do two passes at 24000 bit rate (or even 17000 bit rate I think I tried once), the process goes to completion, but I either end up with a video that quits halfway, or occasionally a 0 byte file. What the heck is going on? I'm about to tear my hair out, I've done this so many times. And I've tried a couple different slideshows as well. At first, I thought using the 7.0 beta was the problem, but I reverted to 6.5 and have the same issues. One time, I deleted most of my 200+ slides and tried two passes at 24000, with only 3 or 4 slides in the show, and I think that did actually work. There's just got to be a bug here. The only other logical thing for me to try is installing on a different machine (not that I know why that would matter), but I don't have the ability to do that at the moment. Any ideas? Thanks!