[MPlayer-users] mencoder: increasing bitrate doesnt increasequality or filesize...why?

[D Richard Felker III]

On Tue, Mar 02, 2004 at 11:26:25AM +0200, Alexei Khlebnikov wrote:
> On Mon, 1 Mar 2004 21:03:36 +0000
> Adam Rice <adamrice at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> 
> AR> Quoting Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski (dominik at rangers.eu.org):
> AR> > Don't you get the impression that you're doing something massively stupid?
> AR> > It'd already been explained several times, that if the codec has already
> AR> > reached its maximum quality, increasing bitrate won't make any difference.
> AR> 
> AR> Doesn't it strike you as odd that mencoder can't manage a bitrate much above
> AR> 1kbps? It seems unlikely to me that the "maximum quality" for MPEG4 would be
> AR> less than the maximum quality for MPEG2. I was under the impression that MPEG4
> AR> was MPEG2 plus some extra tricks for handling lower bitrates.
> 
> It was said many times but I'll repeat:
> Do not scale down too much! Resolution limits the quality of your output!

BTW "too much" is any lower than 640 horizontal. Back in the days of
"divx3" it made sense to use 512x384 and such, but now there's really
no excuse to go below 640xHHH, imo.

Rich