[MPlayer-users] vbitrate command isn't respected

[D Richard Felker III]

On Mon, Apr 19, 2004 at 03:39:01PM -0700, Jack wrote:
> rds_correia wrote:
> 
> >Hi there,
> >I've been using mencoder and mplayer for a couple of months now.
> >I mean under Windows XP with the official builds and my own compilation.
> >I use VOB sources or Fake AVI produced with makeAVIS(FFvfw) so I can use 
> >Avisynth scripts which are similar to those native to mencoder but a bit 
> >more powerful/versatile.
> >My question is that vbitrate doesn't seem to be respected by mencoder.
> >I'm shooting for MPEG2 704x576 to be DVD compliant.
> >
> >Here is my commandline batch file:
> >mencoder -include zMEnc.ini d:\test\bttf_ma.avi -o d:\test\bttf_test.m2v
> >
> >And here is my config file:
> >of=rawvideo=1
> >ovc=lavc=1
> >nosound=1
> >noskip=1
> >sws=2
> >vf=yuvcsp,crop=720:552,scale=688:528,expand=704:576
> >lavcopts=vcodec=mpeg2video:vmax_b_frames=2:vrc_buf_size=1835:aspect=16/9:keyint
> >=15:vbitrate=6000:vrc_maxrate=9800
> >
> >Can you verify this issue, please?
> >Thanks in advance.
> >
> > 
> >
> Someone should put this in a FAQ somewhere.
> 
> With such a high bitrate, it's probably just already using the lowest 
> possible quantizer all the time.  Use vqmin=1 (I believe the default is 
> 2), and the bitrate will get much higher.  But you won't see much 
> increase in quality.  But then, if you're encoding for max quality and 
> you don't care about file size (which it looks like you are), you should 
> really be using vqscale=2 (or 1, if you /really/ don't care about size) 
> instead of specifying a target bitrate. 

With recent lavc you need both vqmin=1 and lmin=1 for it to work,
iirc.

> There's other ways to use more bits... I think if you add vme=1 the 
> bitrate goes up, no idea how much impact that has on quality though. 
> I've never tried to do what you're doing.  Good luck.

Never change vme. It will lower quality. I suppose you could use vme=0
to save cycles for realtime encoding, but all the other settings
except the default are totally useless (lower quality and slower).

Rich