[MPlayer-users] Can mencoder write partial files while encoding?

[Erik Slagter]

> > Transcode is more simple and modular by design then mencoder so for the
> > moment I target for that. Nice extra advantage is that you can encode to
> > any export format/codec transcode knows of. With mencoder you're stuck
> > with 2 formats and 1 video and 1 audio codec. I have tried yesterday to
> 
> False. You're stuck with one audio codec (although you can use pcm,
> framecopy, or encode vorbis audio as a separate step if you want), but
> many video codecs are available. Mpeg 1/2/4, rv10, h263[+],
> msmpeg4v1/2/3, Quicktime binary codecs, Windows binary codecs, raw. Of
> course, all but mpeg4 suck, though...

I am happy with everything that is able to record mpeg2/mp2 (or even
ac3).

A few days ago someone suggested that mencoder would be able to use the
mpeg2 support of recent ffmpeg cvs versions. The public cvs server of
ffmpeg lags a few days though, so I can't yet try that.

So I decided to test it with mpeg1 in the meantime. This works, but I
can't get any sound! The only legal combination is to use pcm audio
"codec" and even that does not work. Mencoder says it's recording audio
and video, but the resulting stream (!) (an avi is useless for me!)
lacks any audio.

So I suggested that it might be possible to add support also for audio
codecs from the ffmpeg/libavcodec package but nobody seems to be
interested. Support for ffmpeg/libavformat would be really great.

Maybe it would even be an option to drop all encoding and format stuff
from mencoder and make it a grabbing front-end to ffmpeg. Which imho is
great, handles a lot of codecs and formats, but doesn't handle a/v sync
correctly.