FAQ and troubleshooting

Licensing

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

No, it's a per-developer, royalty-free license. After purchasing the developer license you can distribute the filter along with the end-user application you have developed on as many PCs as needed, without having to pay 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?

if the video pin is connected in RGB32 or RGB24, the filter overlays a logo over the video frames,
if the video is connected in another format (YUY2, etc...), the filter flashes alternatively one time then 2 times, this flashing occurs periodically,
the recording is limited to 1 minute.

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

Verify in the syntax help of the transcoder if you can specify additionally the pipe input format (asf). If this does not help, retry after specifying the COMPRESS keyword, however this will increase the CPU load.

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.

If you are using FFmpeg add -report to the command line, so you will get the FFmpeg log file in the current folder.

When I run the graph it just hangs

Usually the problem is a wrong transcoder parameter syntax, a missing space, etc... The filter verifies if the transcoder process starts, but it does not check the syntax itself.

if you are using FFmpeg, remove the DONTOVERWRITE keyword if you have added it. If specified and the file exists, FFmpeg waits indefinitely for the manual confirmation to overwrite the file. Using DONTOVERWRITE is not recommended for this reason.
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.