[MPlayer-users] Re: mencoder/crop => image distortion

[Jonathan Rogers]

D Richard Felker III wrote:
> No, Jonathan. What it boils down to is a know-it-all newbie spouting
> off crap without any understanding whatsoever of what video formats
> and video compression are. There's not much more annoying than someone
> who refuses to listen to quantitative facts (i.e. yv12 cannot be
> cropped to odd sizes/offsets) and keeps trying to disguise those facts
> as someone else's personal bias. Normally I try to be polite and
> helpful on this list. I don't think I did anything ugly to provoke
> you, but you seem determined to argue or undermine every point I make
> about these technical matters, which should be explained by someone
> who understands the logic behind them, not someone who says "Hey I
> encoded with these options and it seems fine and I don't want to lose
> one line of the image!!!" with no understanding of what he's talking
> about...

I was trying to end the discussion, but sure enough you showed 
your true colors. There's nothing worse than a know-it-all (well 
I don't exactly how much you know, but it's not everything) 
person. I admit that I was naive in my original replies, but I do 
want to learn. I did learn some from your explanation. I admit 
that I can be quite argumentative, but you're clearly no slouch 
yourself.

I admitted that I wasn't sure about the issue and simply related 
my experiences. All you could do was call my judgment into 
question. You basically said, "I know how it works, so if you 
observed something different, you're either blind or a liar." It 
could be that cropping to an odd dimension destroys the image on 
your setup or did at one time, but that's not what I've observed. 
I haven't made up my mind though, so I'll experiment some more.

Visual quality is a subjective measure, so you can't make 
absolute statements about it without observation. You tried to 
make a similar claim on the audio frequency resampling issue. 
Then there's the issue of using a constant qscale for a first 
pass with lavc. You've insulted the manpage writer for 
recommending it, though various people (including me) have gotten 
better results that way.

As I said before, you know much more about the technical aspects 
of this subject than I do, but I'm neither blind nor stupid. The 
fact remains that you're an arrogant asshole who talks like he 
knows everything. I call your judgment into question, not because 
of a lack of intelligence, knowledge or experience, but because 
of your titanic ego. From now on, I will take everything you say 
with boulder of salt since you can't ever admit that you might 
have been just the slightest bit wrong. Notice that I haven't 
said you're wrong on this particular issue, just that you haven't 
carefully enough considered it before passing judgment.

Jonathan Rogers