[MPlayer-users] probably my usual stupid question of the week

[Aaron Peterson]

well, i think i'm catching on to using mencoder a little bit better the
more I stay at it.  All the documentation I read says the elequent aspect
preservation method for mpeg4s only to be used with mplayer is autoaspect
(-lavcopts).  I haven't explicit instructions anywhere for how to preserve
aspect for other players.  I'm guessing that -vf scale has something to do
with that, but I an official recommendation on that one.  I have
previously used -vf scale -zoom -xy 640 to scale down the size of videos
i'm encoding, but perhaps I just want to preserve aspect without changing
sizes?  do i just make the -xy XXX equal whatever the normal width of the
movie is?  i generally crop as well, and understand that the order of the
filters for -vf matters.  should crop go before or after scale?

I obviously need lots of help :)
aaron