[MPlayer-users] variable bitrate, fixed quality

[D Richard Felker III]

On Mon, Jul 07, 2003 at 07:54:07PM +0200, Nikolaus Rath wrote:
> [Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read DOCS/bugreports.html]
> Hans Meine <hans_meine at gmx.net> wrote:
> > [Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read DOCS/bugreports.html]
> > On Monday 07 July 2003 18:49, Nikolaus Rath wrote:
> >> I want to encode a video with a completely variable bitrate but with a
> >> fixed quality. I don't want to use a fixed quantizer too, because this
> > 
> > The bitrate is what you are looking for. Using 2-pass encoding will try to 
> > achieve constant quality. If you don't want to constrain the quality, specify 
> > an enormous bitrate (recall that bitrates above some value are not kbits 
> > anymore, but bits, so add some more zeroes) and lavc will do as good as it 
> > can.
> 
> This doesn't work. I tried it and lavc compressed nearly all frames
> with a quantizer of 3, even if most of them would be perfect with 6. I

They're NOT perfect with 6. Your eyes just can't tell the difference.
Write a program that will determine when your eyes could tell the
difference, and when they wouldn't, and then we'll incorporate it into
lavc... :))

Rich