[MPlayer-users] insane compulsive maniacal mencoder settings

[D Richard Felker III]

On Sun, Nov 24, 2002 at 01:19:13AM +0100, Robert R. Wal wrote:
> But the problem is, that the ABR gives much lower quality than -q modes
> of the same nominal bitrate (ABR encoding engine is younger and less
> tuned than the -q one). Last time I checked the difficult samples (high
> bells, broken glass, percussion ``plates''(?), rain) encoded with
> 1.0 release ABR 64kbps sounded like -q -1 (~48kbps). There was similar
> analogy between ABR 80kbps and -q 0 (~64kbps), but at higher bitrate
> the difference disapeared.

How reliable are the size estimates you give for -q? If -q 0 stays
around 64 kbit very well, I might try it next time.

> There is one more possibility. Encode sound first and let the script do
> the math about desired bitrate for the video. Most of the time
> mencoder sticks to the bitrate you tell him to use with 0.2kbps acuracy.

With default settings, yes. But I use a huge value for vratetol
because it seems to greatly improve quality. Usually lavc gets things
about right in the second pass still. But additionally, I wanted all
the 690 kbits/sec of video I originally asked for to keep video
quality good, leaving only 66 for audio.

Rich