[MPlayer-users] mencoder video card recommendation

[Jack]

Jack wrote:

> I would recommend grabbing raw, and encoding to HuffYUV in realtime.  
> Anime fansubbers swear by it because it's pretty much lossless.  In my 
> own experience, it only eats around 20% of the CPU on my Athlon XP 
> 1700.  I'll see if I get an example to show off.
> -lt
>
So.  I made some samples, using my bt878 card (a $20 Leadtek Winfast 
2000).  You probably can't do much worse than this.   And, except for 
some lavcdeint ugliness now and then, I think it looks pretty good.  You 
will have to deal with the deinterlacing problem, though, either by 
getting a card that does it for you (I have no idea which ones those 
would be), or figuring out how to make the deinterlacing filter behave.  
If you get that Canopus, hopefully you won't have to deal with this.

On my machine, doing this used 50-60% according to top... your Athlon 
1150 should be able to do it.  If it can't, you can always take out the 
filters and put them in later, or add an aq=(something big) argument to 
lameopts - the audio encoding eats more CPU time than you'd expect.  Or, 
as a last resort, tell your capture card to cut the resolution.  I think 
a good capture card would eliminate the need for the deinterlace filter, 
and free up some CPU time.

It'll use 20-25 GB/hr ... much more if you take out the cropping and 
deinterlacing.

Here's my command line.  I didn't do anything special; just set the card 
to its maximum resolution, ran autocrop, and told it which sound card to 
grab the audio from. 
    mencoder tv:// -vf lavcdeint,crop=680:442:48:18 -tv 
driver=v4l2:input=1:normid=1:width=768:height=480:alsa:adevice=hw.1,0\
     -oac mp3lame -ovc lavc -lameopts cbr:br=320:mode=3:vol=10 -lavcopts 
vcodec=huffyuv:vstrict=-1

And here are the samples.
http://216.254.23.252/~lt/test10.avi       <-- 10 MB clip
http://216.254.23.252/~lt/test30.avi       <-- 30 MB clip
http://216.254.23.252/~lt/test10nodeint.avi <-- 10 MB clip - without the 
deinterlace filter.

-lt