[MPlayer-users] Best mencoder codecs and options foranimations/cartoons?

[Loren Merritt]

On Fri, 27 Aug 2004, Pablo Morales wrote:

> Excuse me,
> I've read the vmax_b_frames=1 is not a good option to achieve good option
> when quality is a goal, am I wrong?

On some sources with very high motion, B-frames can reduce compression
(equivalently, increase bitrate or reduce quality). But I've never seen a
whole movie for which that was the case, only short clips.

On all anime I've encoded, vmax_b_frames=1 helped by between 5% and 20%
bitrate at a given PSNR.


Sidenote: Since most video likes B-frames but some doesn't, and
vb_strategy doesn't do a good job at predicting which, I've tried
writing a R-D optimal B decision mode. It works, but uses multiple passes
over the whole video (for vmax_b_frames=1, that's 4 analysis + 2 encode
passes), so I don't know how I could possibly integrate it into lavc.
I suppose I could cut it down to 5 parallel encodes + 1 second pass, with
just a little extra encoding delay, if I were to give up the R-D optimal
closed-GOP support.

--Loren Merritt