[MPlayer-users] Question on "trans-coding" with mencoder...

[Rainer Hantsch]

Hello!

A friend of me gave me some "svcd" files. These are unscaled mpeg-1 files with
a black bar on top and bottom, but mixed with mp3 audio.  Both, XINE and
MPLAYER are perfectly able to play these files.
Well, my problem is that I would like to make one big film out of the existing
two parts and store it in my prefered format, DivX4.

After playing around for some hours and reading the documentation of how to
use mencoder (I got this doc from mplayer website), I was able to rescale
every particular file, remove hereby the "Eggheads" and black bars, and store
it as DivX4 file. (I did so by extracting the audio track without any change
and only recoding the video-track, following the general instructions of the
docs.)

The result are, as I said, two *.AVI files, playing fine, with only a very
little data transfer from CD-ROM, and perfectly synchronized.
_______

Then I followed the instructions for concatenating multiple avi files to one
big file by entering exactly that what stands in the docs.
It worked, but the resulting file is not playable with XINE. It immediately
tells me something about a damaged file.

So I used transcode's avimerge to do this step: The result is a basically
working file, but -- I do not know why -- it causes extremely high action on
the CD-ROM. (LED >50% on, while the previous files cause a short LED-flash
every 3-5 seconds, for the same film, only before merging.)

NOT VERY SATISFYING.  =8-(


I also tried to cut the first part's last 2MB because they are repeated at the
beginning of the 2nd part, using transcode's 'avisplit' (because nothing
similar seems to be possible with mplayer/mencoder).
Doing so, causes a loss of synchronization between audio/video from beginning
of the second part. :-/


My question is:
---------------
· What am I doing wrong?
· What must I do (step by step) to get a 100% working DivX4 file?
· Can mencoder create mpeg files, too? (I have an original SuSE 8.0, which
  has a downstripped jpeglib, which cannot ENcode mpeg, only DEcode. When
  mencoder can do encoding without this library, shouldn't it work? - How?
· Is there any video cutting tool planned, which allows to work with GUI
  and several file formats (DivX4, MPEG1/2,...)

mfg

  Ing. Rainer Hantsch