So, I have downloaded and tried both, the Xilisoft Video Converter and avs video editor. Sadly, neither of the tools is able to encode with CRF. AVS can't even save as MP4 or MKV, only AVI, MPEG, WMV and MOV. AVC (x264/h.264) within an AVI-container can produce a lot of playback issues. Neither it can be played an most hardware players nor it can handle b-frames correctly in many cases. And both programs supports only a few x264/h.264 encoding parameters - Xilisoft a bit more, but still not all and it's hard to manage (the parameters). Cutting is fine with both.
For me, Avidemux would be the choice in any case. And it's free. You have full and easy control over all x264 parameters. You can encode with 50 fps. But at the very first start, it seems to be a bit tricky, to get AVC-videos working fine. I tried with a highlight from one of you in a MKV-container. Avidemux opens that container slowly and did not recognize the 50 fps (showed 25; had to correct it manually). After cutting a few scenes I tried to encode in x264 into an MP4-container. It wrote and wrote and wrote and no progress seemed to happen, so I killed the process. After that, I demuxed the video- and audiostreams within the MKV-container with MKVExtractGUI 2.2.2.5 (was very fast) and got a .h264 and .mp3 stream. I opened Yamb 2.1.0.0 b2 and created a MP4-container with this two demuxed streams (was very fast too). Now I imported this MP4-file within Avidemux and that worked fine - correct fps-recognition, no errors with encoding - and it imported very fast and the winding (fast forward ...) was extremely fast. By opening a file with an AVC-stream in general, you'll be asked to use a save mode - answer with yes. Now the winding is a bit incorrect while jumping through the video. But framesteps forward are correct. This question while opening a .h264-stream is because referenced b-frames aren't handled correctly within Avidemux. But you don't know, if this had been used to create the original file, so you have to use Avidemux' save-mode. But thats NO problem! Avidemux has no cutlist. You have to cut A-B-wise everytime. For me, that would be no problem too. And you don't have to cut the match at one time. There's an option to save a project file. If you open that again, it's like you never closed Avidemux before (video is loaded, former cuts are still done). And Avidemux works with 32- and 64-bit (true, not only 64-bit compatible)! Just download the ZIP-Version, extract it somewhere and run it. Done. No extra codecs will be installed. I use Avidemux 2.5.6 Y-1.
http://avidemux.sourceforge.net/These are the integrated codecs and their versions - integrated, not extra installed to your system!
Included libraries:
Aften git-c0bd512c93b1186c28b45cc66f6e4f70fd41191c
FAAC 1.28
FAAD2 2.7
Fontconfig 2.8.0
Freetype 2.4.4-1
LAME 3.99
libogg 1.3.0
libxml2 2.7.7-1
libvorbis 1.3.2
libvpx 0.9.7-p1
NSPR 4.8.9
opencore-amr 0.1.2
Qt 4.8.0
SpiderMonkey 1.7.0
x264 r2120
Xvid 1.3.2
zlib 1.2.5-1
Included applications:
Avisynth Proxy GUI 2.20
It's possible, to save custom configs for every codec used. The x264 ones are saved here (at least in my Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit):
C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\avidemux\x264
You could simply put my custom config in there and load it within Avidemux and you have the perfect and hardware player compatible x264 parameters ready to encode! You only have to adjust the I-Frame-Intervall (GOP size) (keyint -> fps 25 should have 25 min and 250 max; fps 50 should have 50 min and 500 max ...) and the number of ref-frames (ref -> generally 5; only 4, if your video height is higher than 864). Both parameters you find within the x264-codec (MPEG-4 AVC/H.264) parameters on page 4. And of course you can try different CRF values (my config uses a value of 22; page 1).
Here's my custom config file for Avidemux' x264 (MPEG-4 AVC)-settings:
https://rapidshare.com/files/3290252431/config.zipAs output container I use MP4, because it's compatible with my mobile phone and the playstation 3. That should be fine for you too. But you can try MKV too, of course.
If you want, have a try.
