[MPlayer-users] insane compulsive maniacal mencoder settings

[Michael Waters]

Hi, thanks for giving all the tips below.  I'm going to try them out on
a bit of video that libavcodec doesn't seem to like too much.

On Thu, Nov 21, 2002 at 23:11 -0500, D Richard Felker III wrote:
> My first recommendation would be to ignore the audio to begin with
> (just use -oac copy so there's some audio to sync with) and transcode
> it to ogg and make an ogm file later on. That way you can get high
> quality audio at only about 64-72 kbit/sec average, leaving plenty of
> room for video.

I like ogg too.  Sometimes though, ogg at bitrates lower than about 100
kbps on 48000 Hz sndtracks sounds bad to me, especially on headphones. 
The stereo 'separation' seems over 'enhanced' like it's trying to
compensate for the low bitrate... it's a very annoying sound.  So the
advantage over mp3 is kinda nullified at superlow bitrates.  It seems
better with 44100 Hz though.  And mplayer's seeking on ogm files bugs
me. :)

> last I checked it wasn't compatible with B frames. AFAIK, specifying
> v4mv should never reduce quality, but it may prevent some old junky
> versions of DivX from decoding it (can anyone conform?).

I've tested files with v4mv on windoze media player with ffdshow &
divx5 and they play fine.  not sure about old divx codecs though.

[.. a lot of encoding tips snipped...]

> Now, my personal success story! I just recently managed to fit a
> beautiful encode of Kundun (well over 2 hours long, but not too many
> high-motion scenes) on one cd at 640x304, with 66 kbit/sec abr ogg
> audio, using the options I described above. 

I've found libavcodec mpeg4 generally makes excellent looking files. 
There's only a few minutes of video I've come across that it sucked at
compressing at any bitrate and for some reason xvid compressed a lot
better.

> So, IMHO it's definitely possible to get very good results with
> libavcodec (certainly MUCH better than all the idiot "release groups"
> using DivX3 make), as long as you take some time to play around with
> the options.

Yeah, there is a lot of junk on irc, p2p, and usenet that looks
extremely bad.  The best looking mpeg4 encodes I've ever seen are to be
found in alt.binaries.monter-movies . yup that's 'monter' ...not a
typo.  Stuff by posters going by 'Dreg','Labmonkey' and some others
look very good.