[MEncoder-users] The best quality OSS mpeg2 encoder?

[Joe Friedrichsen]

The Wanderer wrote:

> Since your situation has changed, in that you now have more information
> than you had before, it would have been polite to - at the least -
> re-phrase the parts in question to indicate that you have the answers
> and convey briefly your understanding of what those answers are.

Sorry for the blatant cross-posting. Many of those answers have been
clearly answered, and I neglected to summarize and modify. The situation
has become much more straightforward for me thanks to your (and RC's and
Erik's) replies. The last bit of murkiness for me is the way to access
libavcodec, but I need to do some more reading first to more finely
specify my questions.

I guess what I'd like more clarity on for now are the differences
between mpeg2enc and libavcodec (when it comes to making DVD-compliant
mpeg2 video). mpeg2enc is said to make more compliant (and slightly more
efficient) streams, while libavcodec is much faster without sacrificing
quality. What about libavcodec lets it encode more quickly? I suppose it
sacrifices some size-efficiency for speed, but the differences in output
sizes aren't so great to make me think that that's the sole reason.

Joe