[MPlayer-users] Re: chopping off credits

[Jonathan Rogers]

D Richard Felker III wrote:
> 50 meg?!? Use vcr_override to encode them at low quality if it's
> taking that much, but I would expect something more like 10-20 meg.
> 

If you use a high quantizer on text, it may become unreadable, depending 
on how big the text is. Text requires more sharpness than typical 
photographic scenes. That's why the credits at the end of a movie 
broadcast on TV are often unreadable.

I certainly do want to have the credits available when I view the movie 
later. When trying to fit a movie on one 700-800MiB CD-R, I've cut the 
video at the beginning of the credits, while encoding the audio in a 
separate OGG.  I find this acceptible because IMDB is more convenient 
for getting credits than the end of the movie anyway. It may not be for 
someone without a persistent Internet connection or for very obscure movies.

After removing credits from several movies, it occured to me that since 
credits typically scroll in a purely linear fashion, they can be 
preserved exactly as a single tall image, rather than as a series of 
images. So, that's what I did, using mplayer (-vo png), ImageMagick, and 
Gimp. I ended up with a PNG that was not reduced in area, but only half 
of a mebibyte and much sharper than the MPEG-4 video would have been.

Of course, there are several caveats. Mainly, it was a time consuming 
process, so I've only done it a couple of times. I'm sure it could be 
more automated. It also reveals the varying speed of the telecine 
machine (or whatever was used in the digitizing process), as well as 
stretching of the film.

Another problem is that the PNG is no longer part of the same object as 
the main video. I ended up with three objects on the CD-R: the main OGM, 
the credits music OGG, and the credits PNG. This is where SMIL and/or a 
flexible container like Matroska could come in handy. You could probably 
integrate those three types of objects well with Quicktime, Real, or 
Flash, but they're proprietary. Real is developing an Open Source 
framework, so that might fit the bill as well.

Jonathan Rogers