[MPlayer-users] Some question

[Nick Name]

Hi, I am trying to use mencoder as a vcr program. I got a bt878 
videocard and there are three main thing I still can't understand.

1. 
I need to specify "outfmt=i420" and "-vc rawi420" when recording, or my 
tv-card gives me strange colors. Well it's ok, but when I DON'T use 
these options, I can rescale my movies, and obtain wonderful-quality 
400x300 cartoons with low disk usage. When I use i420, no matter what 
rescaling I specify, I always get BAD-QUALITY 768x576 (I should use 
quadruple bitrate for double resolution indeed). Any ideas? Reading 
data directly in 400x300 is a good compromise, but it appears to me 
that sws=2 and rescaling is better than sampling at a lower resolution. 
I may be wrong of course.

2.
How the FAQ do I record from dsp and encode the result together with 
the movie? OK I've read the FAQ just after writing this point so don't 
bother i'm too lazy to delete :)

3.
First, I want to say that mplayer/mencoder ARE better than any other 
program I've ever tried for this purposes. Why does vcr with avifile 
and win32 codecs correctly recognize my tv-card and correctly grab 
colors, while I have to specify that rawi420 in mencoder? And, is there 
some kernel-argument to let my tv-card communicate correctly its 
colorspace?

After this all, a quick suggestion: make brightness/contrast/etc. 
adjustable by cmdline in mplayer so that I can write a shell script for 
each one of my movies to automanually get the brightness/contrast/etc. 
I want for that movie (... do it myself? Hmmm ;) )

Bye & thnx

Vincenzo Ciancia

P.S: Since I am not subscribed to the mailing list, if you plan to 
answer me only on the ML, please let me know at least :)