[MEncoder-users] mencoder blues

[Dev Gorur]

I've been having serious trouble with mencoder and am at the point where I
start dissing it to friends and colleagues. Initially, I was quite taken by
all the praise showered on it, and have spent many hours trying to get it to
do simple things like encode 20 jpegs into a movie that can be played by at
least one reasonably well-known movie player other than mplayer.

Fair assumption: The majority of the world does not use mplayer to play
movies, and therefore the movies that mencoder makes need to be playable on
a reasonable range of other players. First I discovered the `trick' that
unless one forces the fourcc to DX50, the mpegs produced by mencoder are
useless unless you have mplayer. Now it seems that one needs similar black
magic tricks to get qtvideo, or even lavc with rv20, to work!

The following command:
mencoder 'mf://fitImage*.jpg' -mf type=jpg:fps=2 -ovc lavc -lavcopts
vcodec=rv20 -o gaussMovie.rm

Results in a movie that produces the following output from realplayer:
Unsupported document type. (
file:///afs/ir.stanford.edu/users/d/g/dgorur/Research/PC/Own_code/Matlab/Testing/GaussAll/gaussMovie.rm
)

Attempts at qtvideo:
mencoder 'mf://fitImage*.jpg' -mf type=jpg:fps=2 -ovc qtvideo -o
gaussMovie.qt

result in:
Making movie
MEncoder 1.0pre7try2-3.4.4 (C) 2000-2005 MPlayer Team
CPU: Advanced Micro Devices Athlon MP/XP Thoroughbred (Family: 6, Stepping:
0)
Detected cache-line size is 64 bytes
CPUflags: Type: 6 MMX: 1 MMX2: 1 3DNow: 1 3DNow2: 1 SSE: 1 SSE2: 0
Compiled for x86 CPU with extensions: MMX MMX2 3DNow 3DNowEx SSE

File not found: 'frameno.avi'
Failed to open frameno.avi
success: format: 16  data: 0x0 - 0x0
[demuxer] mf support.
[mf] search expr: fitImage*.jpg
[mf] number of files: 5 (20)
VIDEO:  [IJPG]  0x0  24bpp  2.000 fps    0.0 kbps ( 0.0 kbyte/s)
[V] filefmt:16  fourcc:0x47504A49  size:0x0  fps: 2.00  ftime:=0.5000
QuickTime6.3 DLLs found
QuickTime.qts patched!!! old entry=0x6693c3e0
theQuickTimeDispatcher catched -> 0x6693c3e0
WARNING! Invalid Ptr handle!

### Searching for QuickTime plugins (*.qtx) at /usr/local/lib/codecs...
### FindNext: QuickTimeEssentials.qtx
### FindNext: AvidQTAVUICodec.qtx
### FindNext: QuickTimeInternetExtras.qtx
### FindNext: BeHereiVideo.qtx
theQuickTimeDispatcher catched -> 0x6693c3e0
theQuickTimeDispatcher catched -> 0x6693c3e0
Opening video filter: [expand osd=1]
Expand: -1 x -1, -1 ; -1  (-1=autodetect) osd: 1
==========================================================================
Opening video decoder: [ffmpeg] FFmpeg's libavcodec codec family
Selected video codec: [ffmjpeg] vfm:ffmpeg (FFmpeg MJPEG decoder)
==========================================================================
Writing AVI header...
ODML: Aspect information not (yet?) available or unspecified, not writing
vprp header.
VDec: vo config request - 1201 x 901 (preferred csp: Planar YV12)
Could not find matching colorspace - retrying with -vf scale...
Opening video filter: [scale]
VDec: using Planar YV12 as output csp (no 3)
Movie-Aspect is 1.33:1 - prescaling to correct movie aspect.
SwScaler: reducing / aligning filtersize 5 -> 4
SwScaler: reducing / aligning filtersize 1 -> 4
SwScaler: reducing / aligning filtersize 1 -> 1
SwScaler: reducing / aligning filtersize 5 -> 4

SwScaler: BICUBIC scaler, from Planar YV12 to Packed YUY2 using MMX2
Cannot find requested component
FATAL: Cannot initialize video driver.

Exiting...
---------------
Rumours found in the depths of google sewers spoke in hushed whispers of
wrong video depths. Incidentally, all the jpegs are grayscale, so I don't
know what colorspace this stupid encoder is fretting about.

Regards,
Dev