[MPlayer-dev-eng] "Solution" to bugreport

[D Richard Felker III]

On Sun, Oct 05, 2003 at 11:41:42PM +0200, Robos wrote:
> On Sun, 05.10.03, D Richard Felker III <dalias at aerifal.cx> wrote:
> > On Sun, Oct 05, 2003 at 08:22:33PM +0200, Robos wrote:
> 
> Hi Developers!
> 
> > > I recently posted a bugreport to -users but nobody looked at it :(
> > > http://mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/mplayer-users/2003-September/037519.html
> > > Anyway, shortly after I found the reason why it segfaulted. The size of the
> > > video is 639x479 due to a small mistake in corel and obviously something in
> > > mencoder doesn't like it. I haven't checked again since a small scaling in
> > > advance does the trick but I *suspect* that the bug is still there.
> > > I think an error message indicating that the size has to be at least
> > > dividable by 2 (or power of 2?) should be added.
> > 
> > This is a bug in divx, which you should NOT be using. Libavcodec
> > generates files which are much higher quality and completely
> > compatible.
> 
> Hmm, ok, but I tried and the situation was this that the resulting movie had
> to play under win, linux and mac AND in acrobat... This is for distribution
> along a doctor thesis and the users need a simple installer...

Yes. DIVX, XVID, and libavcodec's mpeg4 all generate mpeg4 bitstreams;
they're just different implementations of the encoder (which can vary
a lot in quality) and decoder (which should only vary in speed). DIVX
is known to be by far the worst in quality, and last I checked it was
also the worst in speed.

BTW, instead of telling windows users to install DIVX5 (and the
included spyware or whatever) to play your files, you should recommend
ffdshow to windows users. ffdshow is libavcodec, ported to run as a
windows directshow filter, so you can use it to decode DIVX, XVID, any
other mpeg4, and many other types of video as well on windows, without
having to install bloated, buggy, proprietary codecs. The installer is
also very easy to use, and it provides builtin postprocessing for
improving image quality.

> Anyway, should mencoder segfault?

Yes, because the divx library it's calling segfaults.

Rich