[MPlayer-users] Encode HD to lower resolution to play without "your system is too SLOW"

[Dmitry Antipov]

Hello,

I have 1920x1080 HD movie which is (in the sense of audio/video structure)
almost identical to http://images.apple.com/movies/us/hd_gallery/gl1800/bbc_1080p.zip.
I.e.

...
VIDEO:  [avc1]  1920x1080  24bpp  24.000 fps    0.0 kbps ( 0.0 kbyte/s)
...
Opening video decoder: [ffmpeg] FFmpeg's libavcodec codec family
Selected video codec: [ffh264] vfm: ffmpeg (FFmpeg H.264)
...
Opening audio decoder: [faad] AAC (MPEG2/4 Advanced Audio Coding)
AUDIO: 48000 Hz, 2 ch, s16le, 192.0 kbit/12.50% (ratio: 24000->192000)
Selected audio codec: [faad] afm: faad (FAAD AAC (MPEG-2/MPEG-4 Audio) decoder)
...

While trying to play this, I've got "your system is too SLOW" even with
'-ao null -vo null' (what a world - 3.2 GHz P4 with HT is too slow ... :-().

So I have two questions:

1) What are the best (in the sense of loosing video/audio quality as small as
possible) mencoder options to encode this movie down to given resolution ? For
example, I'm interesting to have this movie in 1280x720 to watch on desktop,
and in 320x180 to watch on portable player. I'm slightly confused with a LOT of
options.

2) Is there a way to encode to fit into specified size ? For example, I want
to fit the movie described above in 1G (loosing as small as possible) - how
to choose encoding options in this case ?

Dmitry