[MPlayer-users] shrink a movie

[Rocky Hetherington]

On Sat, 2002-07-27 at 20:34, Andreas Hasenack wrote:

> > I was just gonna say this... reencoding the video is normally a waste of 
> > time... and mostly movies are encoded with 128kb/s... just reencode the 
> > audio part to something like 96... saves you a lot of space.
> 
> Thanks, will try that first. Should even be faster :)

Better yet extract the audio and reencode it to Vorbis.  You'll probably
lose less quality than reencoding to lower bitrate MP3 while saving
quite a bit of space.  If you've 128Kbps MP3 for audio try using quality
1 or maybe 0 (experiment with it) for Vorbis.

Then mux your video with the Vorbis audio using the ogmmerge tool
(details of which were posted here the other day).

I just spent today encoding my Spirited Away DVD into MPEG4 with Vorbis
audio.  Miscalculated the bitrate a bit and so had room for a good
quality q3 Vorbis stream and still get the file on a 650Mb CD.

The only thing you need to be careful of is Windows users.  I made two
clips (available at http://www.hetherington.co.uk/files/experimental)
that are essentially the same.  Both play back perfectly with mplayer,
but under Windows only one of the files will play (sen-clip-test2).  The
other crashes whatever media player is used to play it.

The only differences are that in the first clip audio is at 48000Hz with
the video stream coming first in the Ogg file, while the second clip is
resampled to 44100Hz with the audio stream before the video.

After doing the whole film i'm very pleased with the results, and all
the Windows users that downloaded the (second) clip were impressed by
how good mencoder can make things.

Screenshots at http://www.hetherington.co.uk/images/snapshots/sen.
-- 
Rocky Hetherington
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