[MPlayer-users] insane compulsive maniacal mencoder settings

[Michael Waters]

On Thu, Nov 21, 2002 at 19:13 +0100, Louis-David Mitterrand wrote:
> I am slowing starting out with mencoder (took me 6 months to parse the
> option system ;-).
> 
> If CPU and time were not factors what would be the very best quality
> settings one could enable in mencoder, notably in -lavcopts and
> -lameopts, to get the best-looking DVD rip into a 700M CDR?

Hi,  I use something like this:
-lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vhq:v4mv:vbitrate=900:vqmin=2:vqmax=31:vpass=1

with vpass=2 on the 2nd pass.  You could also use `keyint=300` to
reduce the number of keyframes.  Also, using `vqscale=2` instead of a
bitrate on the 1st pass seems to improve quality sometimes.  But the
couple times I tried this, the resulting bitrate is a lot lower than
the target bitrate given on the 2nd pass.  I also played with vlelim
& vcelim but for me it didn't give any improvement the couple times I
tried.  Cropping out all the black and scaling down helps a lot.  Also
I've found that sometimes, xvid makes better looking video.

There's encoding.html in the docs, also there are tips here:
http://mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/mplayer-users/2002-October/022426.html
http://www.bunkus.org/dvdripping4linux/

For lame I usually use something like
-lameopts vbr=1:q=7:mode=1:vol=2.4:aq=2

This usually makes a vbr mp3 around 100 kbps which sounds good to me
considering the percentage of time most movies are just dialogue or a
few noises and leaves more room for video.