Avidemux Forum

I can't even begin to count how may times this has happened...

I have more than one file to work on, some are very simple edits and others are a bit more complicated.  But when one has finished, if Avidemux has crashed (as it quite often does after finishing an encoding) or if it did not crash but I closed the file it just finished working on, I will then restart Avidemux if necessary and then begin to do the edits on the next file.  Once I have all the edits done, and have started the next encode, I will realize that I forgot to do some edit in the previous one.  The most common one for me is that I forgot to crop it - that probably happens to me at least once in every three or four encoding sessions.  And it seems like it always happens after a file with more complicated edits.  Cropping is always the very last thing I do (for various reasons) and for some reason it just slips my mind after doing all the other edits.

What I REALLY wish is that every time I press the save button to begin encoding, Avidemux would AUTOMATICALLY save the current project file as a named .py file in the current directory (same directory that the video file came from).  I don't mean the current system where it saves the project in a temporary file that INVARIABLY gets overwritten before it is of any use to me.  I have NEVER EVEN ONCE been able to use that to recover the previous project because something ALWAYS seems to happen to it before I discover that I need it.  ALWAYS, without exception.  If I don't really need it and I am just testing to see that it has been written then sure, in that case it is there, but when I actually really need it, it is NEVER there, or for some reason it can't be read.  It's amazing to me that whatever particular form of lightning strikes that file always happens when I could really use it, but it does.  So that is why I say that every time I click Save, before encoding begins, it would be SUPER helpful if the current project could be saved as a named file (same as if you used the option to save a project file) that does not get deleted until I delete it.  Yes, I realize that means that every few days I would need to go back and delete old project files, but that would be a small price to pay to not have to go through the frustration of doing a complicated edit all over again because I forgot one small thing.

Obviously this would need to be an option that could be enabled or disabled (so that all the people with fantastic memories that never make mistakes won't be annoyed by all the extra project files) but it would be really helpful for those of us with not so great memories.

I would suggest you should use filtered preview before saving.

That said I agree with you that Avidemux doesn't do enough currently to protect edits: an option for multiple per file project autosaves should be provided IMO.

1) The current automated project save lastEdit.py file is rarely useful because it gets overwritten too quickly/easily.
2) There isn't a direct hotkey to save the project.
3) TinyPy doesn't have bindings to save the project so it isn't possible to implement custom commands.
4) Some Avidemux crashes could be avoided. If an unhandled TinyPy exception occurs, there should be a dialog option to just ignore it instead of program termination after Crash.py creation. I would recommend to always report this type of crash.

Quote from: butterw on March 27, 2021, 01:09:08 PMI would suggest you should use filtered preview before saving.

I do that, but haven't you every looked directly at something and not noticed something that should be obvious?  That is how it is with me and cropping - for some reason, especially if I have just made a bunch of other edits, I just don't seem to notice that there still needs to be a crop filter applied.  It's kind of like that basketball video where something that should be perfectly obvious happens (I won't spoil it if you haven't seen it) but most people just don't notice it, because they are paying more attention to what they consider more important, which is what the players are doing and where the ball is.  If I have just done some other tricky edits, I tend to be paying attention to those, and not something as mundane as cropping, until I see the finished video and then it's oh, #*@%!

Quote from: butterw on March 27, 2021, 01:09:08 PM4) Some Avidemux crashes could be avoided. If an unhandled TinyPy exception occurs, there should be a dialog option to just ignore it instead of program termination after Crash.py creation. I would recommend to always report this type of crash.

In my case the crash always occurs right after Avidemux has saved the finished file.  It doesn't occur every time the encoding is completed, and never occurs after a short encode (a few minutes or less), only a longer one (probably a half hour or more).  And apparently I am the only one that has ever seen this problem, but it started a couple versions ago in Avidemux.  And I did post about it at the time, but I guess they want to see logs, and I have two issues with that.  One is they are not easy to create or find (basically I just don't know how off the top of my head), but the much larger one is that there is no way to send them privately to an interested developer.  You can only post them in the forum (or a pastebin or some other place where they can be viewed by just anyone) and since I have no idea what those logs might actually contain, I absolutely refuse to do that.  I don't let my computer send crash reports back to Apple, either.

Possibly I am being overly paranoid, but I would rather be safe than sorry.  Also, in this case, I have a feeling that Avidemux would not record the cause of the crash anyway, but rather that it would only be found in the crash report that I do not allow my computer to send to Apple.  It only takes a moment to restart the program anyway (there is a button to restart it in the dialog telling me it has crashed) and I have never had it crash prior to completing the encoding, so it's not that big a deal for me.

Quote from: Who on March 27, 2021, 02:36:42 PMOne is they are not easy to create or find

If you don't run Avidemux from the Terminal, the log is written to /tmp/admlog.txt. Once you observed such a crash (which I never experienced, probably because I never perform any long encoding tasks on my MBP, and you write that short encodes don't trigger it), please provide this file. Feel free to consistently replace all mentions of your username or names of loaded and saved files in the log.

The crash report which can be sent to Apple may be very useful. You don't need to send it, just inspect it and copy the text to a file, then reject sending the report.

Help > Advanced > Open Application log

the Avidemux logfile doesn't contain anything too sensitive just paths/filenames used in the last session.

Quote from: butterw on March 27, 2021, 03:47:04 PMHelp > Advanced > Open Application log

On Windows only.

Quote from: eumagga0x2a on March 27, 2021, 03:31:40 PMIf you don't run Avidemux from the Terminal, the log is written to /tmp/admlog.txt. Once you observed such a crash (which I never experienced, probably because I never perform any long encoding tasks on my MBP, and you write that short encodes don't trigger it), please provide this file. Feel free to consistently replace all mentions of your username or names of loaded and saved files in the log.

The crash report which can be sent to Apple may be very useful. You don't need to send it, just inspect it and copy the text to a file, then reject sending the report.

Well I had a crash tonight with the new nightly version, and I actually did save both logs, but have not had time yet to go through them and try to find what is in them.  But, you never mentioned how I can get them to you without posting them publicly.

One way I can think of, although it would be some effort for you, is set up a free email account with gmx.com.  They then let you create up to ten additional aliases (additional e-mail addresses) for the same account and I am pretty sure you can also remove an alias if you don't want to use it anymore.  So you could create an account and not give out the main account address to anyone, but use an alias to received e-mailed crash reports.  Just make sure when composing any reply message that the reply will come from the alias address and not the main email address (you can select the from address in a dropdown).  And if anyone starts sending you spam or bad emails at that alias address, you just delete that alias, and make another if you like (they do also have spam filtering).  There may be easier ways (possibly including a different email service) but that's the only one that I can think of offhand.  I don't have any connection to GMX whatsoever, other than that I've had a backup email account with them for probably well over a decade now.

You could save the log as a 7z archive with a password, upload it somewhere and provide the password and the link via PM.