[MPlayer-users] Re: 2pass encoding crashes

[Jonathan Rogers]

Jan Engelhardt wrote:
> Well that way I am sure it will play on Windows.

Windows has nothing to do with it. What matters is the decoder. All of 
the codecs we're talking about do MPEG-4 video, though they don't 
implement exactly the same feature set. Others have already discovered a 
few problems with the DivX decoder. Look at the following URL for details.

<URL:http://www.mplayerhq.hu/~michael/codec-features.html>

So, if your goal is for the video to be decodeable with DivX (which is 
both proprietary and implements fewer features than the Free ones), you 
may have to limit the features you use with the decoder. One guy on this 
list was just talking about DivX having trouble decoding video with 
which he'd used quarter pel motion compensation. There are DShow filters 
using both XviD and ffmpeg for decoding, though unfortunately, more 
people will have DivX installed.

So, we have yet another case where Free Software implements a standard 
more correctly than a common proprietary tool. You'll just have to 
decide what decoders are acceptible for decoding and then try them. I 
usually use libavcodec for both encoding and decoding, but I'm not too 
concerned about implementaion bugs, since it seems to implement the 
standard more completely than most. To be more thorough, I'd try 
decoding with XviD and DivX and others.

This issue is exactly why I've been looking at ways to make movie CDs 
self sufficient, either by making them bootable with an OS and mplayer, 
or by just putting mplayer on them.

Jonathan Rogers