[MPlayer-users] tmpgenc is better!?!?!?

[Carsten Koch]

Wendy Tromp wrote:
...
> I made this homevideo, with a sony (digital) camera, and i captured it 
> using adobe premiere, and then i encoded it to mpeg using tmpenc. 1 hour 
> and 8 minutes of film take about 700 mb. This is reasonable and I tried 
> to create divx with mencoder, but the quality is a lot worse. I have 
> played with options all week and I cannot get good quality divx...
> Can anyone show me an example of what they use when they create divx? 
> I'd like to see that to work with.

Same experience here.
I have source material that is all-digital (from DVB-S).
When I encode it with mencoder, I get compression artefacts and
overall a much worse quality than, for example, when recording the
same movie with an SGI O2's built-in analog composite video capture
card and compress it to MPEG-1 with SGI's dmconvert. Even with a
complete 90 minute movie squeezed on one CD, a dmconvert MPEG-1
looks a lot better than a mencoder divx of the same size.

I believe the secret is, that dmconvert and TMPGEnc have absolutely
the very best algorithms for an optimum quantize matrix and GOP
structure, so they just squeeze much more quality into almost the
same size in spite of the inferior MPEG-1 format.

Of course, dmconvert only runs on IRIX and takes forever on a 180MHz
SGI O2 and TMPGEnc is for an "operating system" that I personally
do not like to use, so I would *love* to be proven wrong. If anyone
shows me how to create excellent quality compression with mencoder,
I'll switch immediately.


Carsten.