[MPlayer-users] copy DVD, then compression, produces "jumpy " and pixelated avi?

[Reimar Döffinger]

On Sat, Dec 27, 2014 at 12:59:52AM -0800, Yang wrote:
> I copied down my DVD by -ovc copy , so that I have an exact high-quality
> copy of the original file.

A lot can, and often will, go wrong with -ovc copy.

> but the second batch of output produces very low quality, the images are
> highly pixelated, and the big pixels seem to jump quickly; the actual file
> size being generated is much much smaller than the original DVD file. but I
> did manage to get the bit rate up by using mencoder options, to about 2000k
> bits/sec. but even at this high bitrate, the same problem still occurs.

For these use cases using bitrate is usually a bad idea. One-pass
bitrate encoding usually will result in occasionally bad bitrate not
matter how high you go.
You'll rather want "constant quality". That doesn't quite exist, but
the vqscale=... (for most codecs, 2 is a good value) or crf=... (for x264,
pick something around maybe 18) come close.

> that is wrong? I was thinking maybe on the second copy, libdvdcss is not
> automatically invoked so the result is garbled ? I checked libdvdread/css
> is installed correctly

CSS is not involved or required after the initial copy, decrypted is
decrypted, no point in doing that twice.
Probably your -ovc copy didn't produce a working file.