[MPlayer-users] Mencoder help please. Full HOWTO?

[Net Dragon]

Hey all. I am a little new to Mplayer/Mencoder. I am trying to take the
muxed MPEG2 streams off my ex-roommates TIVO, 743 miles away (My linux box
is hosted there) and compress a 2 hour clip, including commercials, to
something around 700 megs so it will fit on a CD-R. I have scoured the net
looking for HOWTO’s or guides or anything. I have read through the
documentation but I just can not seem to find anything on getting Mencoder
to work. I am looking for just that, a HOWTO or guide or something. If
anyone can help it would be greatly appreciated.

I would just downloads the 3.2gig stream, but it takes 3 days and FTP
seems to give up after 2.1gigs. I would kinda like to be able to maybe
edit out the commercials after I download the transcoded stream but I
think the only codec I could use is MPEG1 for that. I would rather have
quality and not have to recompress it. The original res on the TIVO
streams is 480x480 with non square pixels. And the bitrate is VBR but
hovers around 4 to 6Mbit or so I would guess. I would prefer to get it to
640x480, deinterlaced DivX or what ever. My Linux box is only an Athlon
600MHz & 256megs RAM, but I can just let it sit there and chunk away on
the video for a day or two right?

Anyway, sorry for the long e-mail, any help would just make my day. Thanks
again all,

- Jason H.