[MEncoder-users] Converting an avi file to mpeg2 for legacy players (losing sound and lots of error messages).

[John Dickinson]

I recently bought a digital camera and took some movies of my kids
which I wish to share with my family who have older computers or in
some cases just older dvd players mpeg compliant.

So I want to convert a 30fps 640x480 24bpp motion jpeg video with
uncompressed PCM sound into
1) a high quality mpeg2 (the basic dvd movie format right?) for
playing on an older dvd player
2) a couple of them need rotating 90 degrees before distributing to
other family with older pcs and stock movie players like Windows media
player v7 or 8. (mostly solved)

I am only converting about 50MB of files and putting them on a cd so
compressing the files is not as relevant as making them portable
without loosing quality.

I have tried (to make good mpeg2):
=========================
D:\mplayer>mencoder -of mpeg -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg2video
-oac copy -vop rotate=1 in.avi -o test.mpg
but get errors like:
WARNING: SCR: 170842242, APTS: 0, DELTA=0.000 secs, BYTES=1853135223
ERROR: SCR: 1.872, VPTS: 1.000, DELTA=-0.872 secs

D:\mplayer>mencoder -of mpeg -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg1video
-oac copy -vop rotate=1 in.avi -o test.mpg
more errors, loss of sound and poor quality video

D:\mplayer>mencoder -of mpeg -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg2video:vbitrate=3200
 -oac pcm -vop rotate=1 in.avi -o test.mpg
Gives good video but no sound. More error messages.

D:\mplayer>mencoder -of mpeg -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg2video:vbitrate=3200
 -oac mp3lame -vop rotate=1 in.avi -o test.mpg
Error messages and crashes the media player.

For problem 2: I do this:
=================
D:\mplayer>mencoder -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=wmv2:vbitrate=6000 -oac copy -vop
 rotate=1 in.avi
works well on my pc and seems portable but asking for vbitrate=7000
(almost the same as the original file as reported by mplayer causes
the video to freeze on playback using the media player)

Thanks for any help!
John