[MPlayer-dev-eng] help, uncompressable video stream

[Joey Parrish]

Hello all,

I used mplayer recently to rip a video into png frames.  Then I rendered
each png as ascii-art, then rendered those back into png frames.  So I
have a sequence of pngs that depict a colored ascii-art version of a
video clip.  I tried to re-encode those to a divx using mencoder -mf.
It took some patching to get mf to read the paletted pngs, and a patch
will be coming as soon as I've figured out what's the "right" fix.

But the thing that really bothers me is that the original video was 91Mb
fairly high-quality divx.  The png sequence totalled over 600Mb after
processing.  But the divx I tried to make from the png sequence came out
to be 2.6Gb for a 6 minute film.  I believe this is probably due to the
fact that there's is very little in common between frames.

Is it impossible to compress this stream well using divx?  Are there
certain options I can use to get it a reasonable size?  Even with
preme=2:vme=1:vbitrate=4 I still get bitrates that are ridiculously
high.  What am I missing?  Is another codec more well-suited to this
kind of stream?  What should I try next?

Thanks,
--Joey