[MPlayer-users] Good settings for encoding?

[Acid Zebra]

Hey all,

I am trying to find some good settings for video encoding of both animated 
low-speed (think watership down) and high-speed animated (think Trigun)

I found this by D Richard Felker III, in a thread called "insane compulsive 
maniacal mencoder settings" :

<SNIP>
That being said, with video you have some tradeoffs you can make. Most
people seem to encode with really basic options, but if you play with
single coefficient elimination and luma masking settings, you can save
lots of bits, resulting in lower quantizers, which means less
blockiness and less ugly noise (ringing) around sharp borders. The
tradeoff, however, is that you'll get some "muddiness" in some parts
of the image. Play around with the settings and see for yourself. The
options I typically use for (non-animated) movies are:

vlelim=-4
vcelim=9
lumi_mask=0.05
dark_mask=0.01

If things look too muddy, making the numbers closer to 0. For anime
and other animation, the above recommendations may not be so good.

Another option that may be useful is allowing four motion vectors per
macroblock (v4mv). This will increase encoding time quite a bit, and
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?). Another issue
might be increased cpu time needed for decoding (again, can anyone
confirm?).

To get more fair distribution of bits between low-detail and
high-detail scenes, you should probably try increasing vqcomp from the
default (0.5) to something in the range 0.6-0.8.

Of course you also want to make sure you crop ALL of the black border
and any half-black pixels at the edge of the image, and make sure the
final image dimensions after cropping and scaling are multiples of 16.
Failing to do so will drastically reduce quality.

Finally, if you can't seem to get good results, you can try scaling
the movie down a bit smaller or applying a weak gaussian blur to
reduce the amount of detail.
</SNIP>

Great advice for non-animated movies....

But has anyone got some recommendations for anime?
On kazaa I found some really amazing encodings of FLCL floating around.
Small file size, crisp encoding.... I want that too!

I got shitloads of simpsons/southpark/futurama DVDs just begging to be 
encoded,
but I can't seem to find the right settings...

A-Z

_________________________________________________________________
Add photos to your e-mail with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*. 
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail