Artifacts/Garbage when viewing via an AviSynth file

I'm using CamStudio with the CamStudio Lossless Codec to capture video of my computer screen. When I watch the video directly that was recorded by CamStudio, it looks flawless; no issues at all. However, when I watch it via an AviSynth script, I get all sorts of weird artifacts and garbage throughout the whole video. For example, a majority of the screen will turn black, but the CamStudio window will become a negative of the original window, or you can see all sorts of trails with the mouse movements, etc. Obviously, I don't want this to happen, nor do I have any clue why it's happening. Has anyone else ever experienced this and know a solution? Thank you. To provide some more info, here's my AviSynth script in its current state (it's only one line): AVISource("20120811_1007_56.avi") Whenever I load that script into VirtualDub or Media Player Classic, etc., it looks really weird. Thank you.

I ran into that problem when I started using CamStudio. Based on what I could deduce from my own testing, it appeared to be related to some non-keyframes being decoded as pure black. Once that happened every other frame until the next keyframe was bad. Anything that moved would appear to jerk around randomly. It was most evident with the mouse pointer. Strangely this only happened in AviSynth. VirtualDub had no problems with those files. The solution I eventually settled on was using FFMS2 to open the videos. I haven't seen the problem since then. If, for some reason, that doesn't work, you could try opening the files with VirtualDub and saving in some other lossless format. As a last resort you could set the CamStudio codec to make every frame a keyframe, which sort of defeats the purpose of using it since the files get significantly bigger.

That's a great answer. Thanks a lot. How do I go about setting a different lossless codec in VirtualDub? Would it be possible to set a different lossless codec from CamStudio instead? Any recommendations? Thanks again.

Oh, okay. I think I'm starting to realize how this all works. Originally, I thought FFMS2 was some kind of full-on program, like VirtualDub, but after downloading it and looking at it, it appears to be some sort of AviSynth class/import file. Is that true? So basically, I need to import/load the FFMS2.avsi file I downloaded into my AviSynth script, and after that, I will use the FFmpegSource2 function in the file to load the video (instead of using the AviSource function), right? After that, I shouldn't have any problems, right? I suppose I should just try to use it myself instead of asking all these questions, but I'm kinda wondering what the ffms2.dll and ffmsindex.exe files are for. Also, since you have a lot of experience with all this, could you please provide a sample script for loading an AVI file with the FFmpegSource2 function as well as perhaps how to perform a few simple transforms? Thank you. I apologize for asking so much, but I really am new to all this, and seeing how a pro does it all (especially one who has experienced what I'm going through right now with CamStudio) is a great learning experience. Thanks again.

FFMS2 is a video decoding library that can be used from a lot of different programs in a lot of different ways, but in your case you can pretend it's an Avisynth plugin that loads files in a way similar to AVISource(). Put ffms2.dll and ffms2.avsi in your Avisynth plugins folder, call ffmpegsource2("file.avi") in your Avisynth script and you're good to go. Note that audio is disabled by default, use atrack=-1 to enable it. Also note that opening files for the first time may take a while, since FFMS2 needs to index them before they can be opened. The indexing information is written to a file after opening so it can be reused later. ffmsindex.exe is a helper program that you can ignore. It's a command-line tool that generates ffms2 index files; it's mostly useful for people who need a progress report on the indexing.

Very helpful. Thanks a lot.

Sorry for all the posts. Anyway, I just wanted to let you know, TheFluff, that I tried out what you said, and it worked perfectly. Vurbal, thank you as well for all your help. This is a great board, and everyone is very helpful. Thanks a lot.