[MPlayer-users] probably my usual stupid question of the week

[Aaron Peterson]

> Rescaling is the only way that most players understand... If you want
> to keep the original size you'll have to use insanely high bitrate
> anyway.

The only reason I would want to keep the original size is to have a nicer
finished movie by preserving information.  If that requires an
unreasonably high bitrate though to look nice, it sounds like you're
saying I would perhaps get more of what I'm looking for by scaling down
though.  I generally wouldn't want to go over two 700 M cds worth of
finished video, and have been encoding original size at
vbitrate=1200-1800.  These look fair, but still show some obvious defects.
 Especially when there's lots of movement with lots of varied color.  I'll
have to experiment and see what I see.  What is an insanely high bitrate
by your definition?  I watch these movies mostly on a 30" widescreen tv. 
That seemed relevant for some reason.

On a related note, I've been using -ovc frameno (and deleting the
resulting file) just to find out what bitrate mencoder thinks I can encode
and stay under the 700M limit.  If I scale down, I assume this will result
in a smaller video file.  Can I use -vf crop=blah,scale=blah with -ovc
frameno to make it take those things into account?

Aaron