[MPlayer-users] Encoding quality advices

[D Richard Felker III]

On Sun, Dec 01, 2002 at 02:52:11PM +0100, Haas Wernfried wrote:
> [Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read DOCS/bugreports.html]
> hi,
> On Thu, Nov 28, 2002 at 10:33:02PM +0100, Moritz Bunkus wrote:
> > What I definitly don't like would be if a user (especially those
> > "ripping newbies") was able to enter a command like
> > 
> > mencoder -dvd 1 --verygoodquality -o iamthemasterofripping.avi
> > 
> > because they would expect too much from such presets.
> i guess you're right about that, maybe people would come up and say
> "hey, i used --verygoodquality and it just sucks", especially if encoding
> something that would really require some other settings. on the other hand,
> there are users (like me) who just want to encode something with 
> decent quality and do not really care if they could get out some 10% 
> higher quality by playing around with some settings. of course it would
> be possible to work through your guide (and possibly others, read a bit
> of source code, etc ;) ), but some people are quite happy with not that
> high-quality results but using a quite good preset. renaming it to 
> --quite-good-quality would also point ot that. don't get me wrong,
> i appreciate your knowledge (and that of a lot of other people on the list),
> but i just don't have that high demand of really perfect quality.
> right now i am encoding with quite simple options and i guess
> --verygoodquality could possibly increase the quality of my videos by
> 10%, working through your guide possibly by 20%. as it is not that important
> to me to gain 20% by hard work, i'd be quite happy with the 10% by just
> typing --quite-good-quality.
> on the other hand, the question is, if people like me just shouldn't use
> mencoder but some frontend (with presets) and leave mencoder alone ;)

Your argument would make sense if it were a difference of 10-20%. As
it stands, it's the difference between getting a horrible encode that
looks worse than DivX4, and an amazing excellent encode that beats
even the release group kiddies with their hacked up DivX3+NanDub.
Essentially you HAVE TO tweak the options to get a good encode, unless
you use very high bitrate (only works for short movies or if you don't
mind spanning multiple CDs) or you scale the movie down a lot (looks
bad). In short, making DVD rips takes a lot of work to get right, and
people who are not willing to RTFM *AND* experiment a lot on their own
to figure out what works best for their movie should NOT be doing it.

Rich