Gordian Knot (Gknot)

What works

* Installation works, except for XVID codec - see description of 'what does not work'.

* Preparing and encoding videos does work, but with a little catch described below.

What does not

* Installation of the XVID codec doesn't work, unless you have an original Windows mfc42.dll and put that into the system32 folder before installing. You might find it on one of the many download sites for DLLs and stuff. Alternatively you could use winetools to setup wine and get the DLL plus more: I found out by testing that it's at least 1/3 to 1/2 faster using GKnot with 'winetools wine' than just 'pure wine'.

* After preparing the videos (*.d2v file and *.avs file) you can't use GKnot's automatic encoding process, as you can't access XVID's 1st and 2nd pass settings via GKnots access buttons. Nevertheless I found a workaround: a) click both buttons for 1st and second pass settings once for creating the 1st and 2nd pass settings files. b) Then start VirtualDubMod and open the created *.avs file. Choose 'fast recompress', go to the codec settings dialogue and chose 1st pass, save to the joblist, do the same for 2nd pass (the end credits start values and file size for 2nd pass are automatically taken over from the settings files created before). Now you can run the encoding process from the joblist.

* Audio encoding obviously doesn't work either, as it is incorporated into GKnots automatic process -> for converting MPEG2 audio files to wave use madplay and for encoding to Ogg Vorbis use oggenc.

* For saving to the Matroska container format use MKVMergeGUI with mkvmerge from Bunkus, as VirtualDubMod warns you (correctly) that its MKV support is a bit dated.

* Taking into account what does and doesn't work in GKnot under wine, you get a very comfortable and accurate bitrate-, crop- and size-assistant to use with VirtualDubMod. And it's still more comfortable and flexible than AVIDemux.

Workarounds

What was not tested

* Ripping DVDs.

* Didn't try to use 'audio only' in the encodings dialogue to use GKnot for audio encoding.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments