[MPlayer-users] mencoder: encoding a B&W movie

[Laurent Joubert]

Hello,

I am trying to encode a B&W movie from a DVD. After a few tries I am 
still a little bit disappointed with the video quality. Since it is a 
"dark" movies, there is a lot of black on the pictures, and on the 
encoded avi I can see a lot of annoying "mpeg squares". I am using 
avifile codec, but the best I think is to give you the command line I 
used to encode a preview of the result:

First pass:
mencoder TITLE01-ANGLE1.VOB -oac copy -ovc lavc -lavcopts 
vcodec=mpeg4:vhq:vpass=1:vbitrate=800:keyint=48 -ofps 23.976 -npp lb 
-ss 2:00 -endpos 0:30 -vop scale -zoom -xy 640 -o movie.avi

Second pass:
the same with vpass=2

I am new to mencoder, so please tell me any idea you have even if it 
obvious. I also tried the "gray" option of lavc, to encode B&W only, 
but strangely it gives me "pink" squares from time to time.

So if you could tell me what option of mencoder or lavc I should be 
looking at to lower the number of "squares" on the image, it would be 
great. The version of mencoder i use is 0.90pre8 on a macos x PPC 
platform. I guess I would have the same problem by encoding anime 
movies, where there are a lot of region of the image with the same 
color. So if you managed to solve this problem...

This is completely off topic, but do you know how I can create good 
subtitles from vobsub subtitles ? I checked the -dumpmpsub option of 
mplayer, but is there a way to do it really fast (ie without having to 
play the whole movie) ?

Thanks,

Laurent.

PS. mencoder gives a "bus error" when it finishes encoding the file. It 
does not seem to be a problem since the avi is perfect, but just to let 
you know. (mplayer 0.90pre8 and MacOS X 10,2, gcc 3.1)