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Introduction to SUPER



This guide will walk you step by step through the installation of SUPER, a free video encoding GUI that comes with a number of free third party tools. SUPER provides a simple interface to command line tools that the average person might find to complicated to use otherwise. It can be used to encode video from and to almost any format for almost any device or application. It also includes a player capable of playing the same files it accepts as input.

While SUPER includes all the tools necessary for most operations, there are other tools that can be useful to run alongside it, such as AviSynth for editing and ImagoMPEG-Muxer or mkvtoolnix for muxing elementary streams to be encoded. You may also want to consider installing ffdshow for decoding a variety of video formats using the Windows DirectShow interface.



Required Software



SUPER

Includes SUPER as well as ffmpeg, Mencoder, MPlayer, x264, ffmpeg2theora, the libavcodec library, and the theora/vorbis RealProducer plugIn

Optional Software





AviSynth

AviSynth is a powerful open source editor, often used to prepare video for encoding by the tools used by SUPER. You can find more information on AviSynth in our guide on Using AviSynth 2.5. It includes not only basic instructions for AviSynth, but also descriptions of a number of built-in filters, as well as third party plugins.



mkvtoolnix

Since SUPER doesn't accept video and audio in separate files (elementary streams) as input, you may want to use mkvtoolnix to create a single (muxed) file to use as input. Matroska (MKV) is a good container to use if you work with video and audio in just about any format. Read our guide on Creating MKV files with mkvtoolnix. At the end of the guide you'll find a link to bring you back here.




ImagoMPEG-Muxer

ImagoMPEG-Muxer is a tool for creating muxed (multiplexed) MPEG-2 files from elementary video files. There's no installer. Simply unzip the file and run it. ImagoMPEG-Muxer only accepts video and audio files as input, while subtitle streams aren't supported.



ffdshow

ffdshow is a DirectShow filter capable of decoding various video and audio formats. In order to use ffdshow in SUPER you'll need to enable DirectShow decoding. Since SUPER already includes support for most of the same formats as ffdshow (often using the same libavcodec code) SUPER's author recommends using DirectShow decoding for increased encoding speed, but if you run into problems you can uncheck it, and SUPER will generally be able to decode files by itself.



Next: Installing SUPER

Table of Contents

  1. 1. Introduction
  2. 2. Installation and Configuration
  3. 3. Using SUPER
Written by: Rich Fiscus