[MPlayer-users] More on encoding quality - using Vorbis

[Corey Hickey]

joe user wrote:
> [Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read DOCS/bugreports.html]
> Thanks for all the suggestions on improving encoding
> quality.  Obviously this is not a simple question of
> "what is the right command to encode a dvd".  There
> are many factors.
> 
> My goal is to store DVD content in a format that is
> high-quality but compact, and playable with MPlayer. 
> It looks like the best output format is Audio Video
> Interleaved (AVI), and the best video encoding system
> is MPEG4 using the lavc.  Is that right?

Yeah, pretty much. AVI is a reasonable container for most purposes,
except that it cannot handle vorbis audio (see below).

> 
> On the audio side, I tried using -oac copy, but that
> resulted in about 1gb of audio data in the file.  I
> know that Vorbis can do a great job of compressing
> audio without any noticable loss of quality, so I
> compiled all the Vorbis libs, did configure
> --enable-vorbis and make.  Configure says that it
> detects vorbis, but when I do mencoder -oac help to
> list the available options, it only lists copy and
> raw.  Is there a way to make a Vorbis-audio encoded
> output?  For that matter, any kind of output encoding
> would be better than copy.
> 

If you want to use vorbis, I suggest you use OGMtools:
http://www.bunkus.org/videotools/ogmtools/

You can follow the instructions in the OGMtools README to combine lavc
video with vorbis audio in an OGM container. This path has its
associated advantages and disadvantages, which have been discussed in
detail on this list before (search the archives).

Or, you could use mencoder -oac mp3lame -lameopts <your-options> to
encode the audio to mp3. This usually works well to produce good-quality
mp3 audio, but beware of very slight audio-video desynchronization in
some cases. :(

-Corey