[MEncoder-users] Mencoder vs. hardware based devices...

[Brian Keener]

Rich Felker wrote:

>On Wed, Jun 22, 2005 at 08:58:16AM -0400, Brian Keener wrote:
>  
>
>>RC wrote:
>>
>>    
>>
>>>Why's that?  Are you using some lossless codec like Huffyuv for the
>>>initial capture?  Using either lavc's mpeg2 or mpeg4 codec with
>>>keyint=1 will give you very fast encoding, and using far less space
>>>than any lossless codec.  Also use something like "vqscale=2" (as
>>>opposed to using "vbitrate=") for live captures.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>      
>>>
>>I'd expect that re-encoding mpeg2 into mpeg2 would merely compound the 
>>artifacting/etc. that I'd end up with.
>>    
>>
>
>If you use qp=2 (or better yet 1!) on the initial encode there will be
>essentially no artifacts to compound. Anyway if your final target is
>mpeg2 (dvd/svcd) instead of highly-vbr mpeg4 or something better, the
>quality will be somewhat bad anyway, so why do you care about quality?
>:)
>
>  
>
>>I'm not sure what the keyint:1 would change, though.
>>    
>>
>
>Make it faster.
>
>Rich
>
>  
>
Hmm.  I'll certainly have to give that a shot.

There's a couple of other factors here that I'm considering as well...  
I'm using an old STB TV-PCI that had a soft drink spilt on it years ago; 
the TV tuner no longer works, and neither does audio passthrough, for 
one thing, and I've always kept an eye out for a decent replacement.  I 
bought the STB card in 1996, as I recall.

That, combined with the fact that virtually all of my problems have been 
capture-related issues, and not re-encoding issues, tends to make me 
think picking up one of those Hauppauge cards for the initial capture, 
and then running it through Mencoder might actually be the way to go.

Thanks for the advice.

If I can get this working smoothly enough, my church has a library of 
about 50 VHS cassettes they'd like to put on DVD.  Lucky me.

Brian K