[MPlayer-users] Which codec is fast and good?

[D Richard Felker III]

On Mon, Aug 25, 2003 at 05:27:36PM +0200, Rainer Hantsch wrote:
> Is there another codec who gives good compression with a minimum of CPU load?
> I will accept any file format which can be converted afterwards into a useful
> file format, as long as this causes no additional quality loss.

What you should try is using -oac pcm instead of lame. Then, once you
finish capturing, do:

  mencoder capture.avi -ovc copy -oac mp3lame -lameopts vbr:q=8 -o final.avi

Using vbr audio will get much better quality too, and by doing it in a
separate pass, it won't waste cpu time encoding audio during the video
capture phase. And of course, -oac pcm is lossless; just make sure you
have a plenty disk space and that your hd is fast enough for 1.4
mbit/sec of audio data in addition to the 900 kbit/sec video (should
be no problem unless your dma is broken).

One more thing -- if your second pass for audio tries to skip or
duplicate frames (because mencoder a/v sync is broken and sucky), use
-mc 0 -noskip! The a/v sync is already right anyway and doesn't need
correcting.

Rich