[MPlayer-users] lavc-Options for *BEST* quality?

[D Richard Felker III]

On Mon, Feb 03, 2003 at 09:07:59PM +0200, Yourself wrote:
> [Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read DOCS/bugreports.html]
> Quoting D Richard Felker III (dalias at aerifal.cx)
> Message date: 03 Feb 2003 at 13:07
> 
> > Also, vorbis audio is a very good way to save space, but ogm container
> > format is horrible. It wastes lots of space on the page headers (about
> > twice as much space as an AVI index for the same file) and it's not
> > easily seekable. I was using ogm enthusiastically for a while, but now
> > I'm using avi, with mp3 :( audio until someone finds a way to put
> > vorbis inside avi or else makes a good a/v format.
> 
> Well, why is it so terrible? I mean, you can save up to 30Kbit/sec (or
> more!) by going from 128Kbit mp3 to 88Kbit vorbis, and allocate 29 
> (maybe more!!) to the video stream itself.

Or you can use lame vbr with q=8 or so and get 90kbit/sec mp3 that
sounds much better than the 128kbit cbr crap most people use. Of
course vorbis at -q0 sounds just as good and uses about 65kbit/s. This
is a savings of about 22 megs for a normal length movie, but when you
consider the extra 12 megs or so you waste on ogg page headers, it's
not really a big difference.

> True, seeking is a bit weird, but who cares?

I do.

> On the other hand, index in avis are right on the end, so in order to
> start playing an avi from a CD, your cdrom has to seek to the end, read
> the index and then "rewind". Ogg does not have this. This means to me
> that an avi in a CD takes about 5-6 seconds to start playing (while the
> cdrom strives to read the last bytes of the 800MB cds) whereas ogg

Apparently your cdrom drive is broken/crappy. I've never had any
problem.

> starts immediately. Sometimes, i'm so pissed off that I use 
> 
> $ cat movie.avi | mplayer -

This is nonsense, just use -noidx.

> For my part, I never encode to avi....

In summary, vorbis is very very good, but ogg is very very hideous.
Whoever designed the ogg container format was smoking crack. It's
mediocre for audio use, and terrible for video. :(

Perhaps if Arpi sticks around a bit after 0.90 we can go through
what's needed for a good container format and implement it in mplayer
and mencoder... :))

Rich