Wayne D's Blog

When creating the deliverables for my latest Howcast.com video I couldn't remember the settings I used last time to export the high quality masters I needed. Cinelerra suggested these presets for the use pipe command line:

ffmpeg -f yuv4mpegpipe -i - -y -target dvd -ilme -ildct -hq -f mpeg2video %

but when I used them I received the following error message.

int YUVStream::write_frame(utint8_t**): write_frame() failed: system error (failed/write)

after some fiddling and Googeling I realized that the error message meant that ffmpeg wasn't returning any frames and the culprit was the -hq which isn't supported by my version of ffmpeg. I also had to change the -ilme -ildct to -flags +ilme+ildct and remove the -target dvd to keep ffmpeg from rescaling the video from it's native size giving me a pipe command line of:

ffmpeg -f yuv4mpegpipe -i - -y -flags +ilme+ildct -f mpeg2video %

Which gave a video that looked ok when played with ffplay but which had a purple bar across the top when played with mplayer. After a bit more fiddling I came up with the following pipe command line which gives good quality video that plays on both video players.

ffmpeg -f yuv4mpegpipe -i - -y -qmax 2 -f mov -vcodec mpeg2video %

I hope this alleviates your frustration when trying to use the YUV4MPEGSTREAM Rendering Option in Cinelerra.