FAQ and troubleshooting

Licensing

Should I buy one license for each one of my customers?

No, it is a per-developer, royalty-free license. Once the developer license has been purchased, the filter can be distributed together with the end-user application on as many PCs as needed, without paying anything else.

Does the Multipurpose DirectShow Encoder include GPL code?

No, the Multipurpose DirectShow Encoder includes only a LGPL build of ffmpeg.exe. There is no GPL code installed by the package.

Evaluation version

What are the limitations of the evaluation version?

each encoding session stops after 1 minute,
if the video pin is connected in RGB32 or RGB24, the filter overlays a logo over the video frames,
if the video pin is connected in another pixel format (YUY2, etc.), the image flashes periodically, one time then 2 times, alternately.

These limitations are removed in the licensed version, which is activated with a license key.

Troubleshooting

The recorded file or output stream stops after 1 minute

The filter is running in evaluation mode. In this mode the recording is limited to 1 minute.

The frame rate is too slow

Check the codec's settings options, and choose a faster compression setting, and/or reduce the output video size.

In real-time compression, if the time to compress 2 frames becomes longer than the time between 2 frames, frames are dropped.

The transcoder does not recognize the pipe input stream

Check in the syntax help of the transcoder whether the pipe input format (asf) can be specified explicitly. If that does not help, retry with the COMPRESS keyword, keeping in mind that it increases the CPU load.

Can another transcoder than the bundled FFmpeg be used?

Yes. When the executable named at the beginning of the command line is not ffmpegLGPL.exe, the filter looks for it at the path given, then in its own installation folder, and starts it with the pipe as input. The progress information is currently reported only when the transcoder is FFmpeg.

When I run the graph I get a "The graph could not change state" error

The origin of the problem is usually a wrong FFmpeg command-line parameter.

Add -report to the command line to get the FFmpeg log file in the current folder.

When I run the graph it just hangs

The cause is usually an incorrect transcoder syntax, a missing space, and so on. The filter checks that the transcoder process starts, but it does not check the syntax itself.

remove the DONTOVERWRITE keyword if it has been added: when the output file already exists, FFmpeg then waits indefinitely for the confirmation to overwrite it, which is why this keyword is not recommended,
if FFmpeg is connecting to a remote URL (e.g. when pushing the FFmpeg output to a Wowza server), this can take a few seconds, and even wait until the FFmpeg connection timeout if the remote URL does not respond.