[MEncoder-users] New Mencoder user: questions about some details

[Niki Kovacs]

Hi,

I'm an Austrian writer living in Montpezat (South France), and a 100%
GNU/Linux user since 2001. My actual system is CentOS 4.3. 

I gave DVD::RIP and Acidrip a shot, but quickly sensed that I had to get
my hands dirty in order to achieve more than partial successes. DVD::RIP
worked OK on half of my CDs, but refused to read the other half. 

I took a few days to read the excellent doc on the MPlayer site, fiddled
around, tried many things, and I'm starting to have my first positive
results... as well as a few questions that emerge. 

I tried encoding with libavcodec. Since time doesn't matter and I have a
rather fast PC, I chose the "best quality" option. I encoded similar to
this option found in the book:

mencoder dvd://1 -ofps 24000/1001 -oac copy -vf
pullup,softskip,crop=720:352:0:62,hqdn3d=2:1:2 -ovc lavc \
-lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=2400:v4mv:mbd=2:trell:cmp=3:subcmp=3:mbcmp=3:autoaspect:vpass=1 \
-o Harry_Potter_2.avi

... and then another pass with the same options and vpass=2. Of course I tuned it to my needs 
(language, subtitles, ...) I admit I used most of the options without knowing too much what they do, 
telling myself that once I liked the result, I could always go back and understand the details later.

Q1: given a certain DVD title, how do I calculate the bitrate for a certain given file size? Say I encode
my DVD with the options above (except bitrate of course), how can I calculate the bitrate for, say, 
250 MB, 400 MB, 650 MB, 700 MB, 800 MB, 1400 MB and so on?

Q2: as far as I understand, the example above only *copies* the sound files without actually *compressing* them?
So am I right in thinking that I can compress the sound simply by using -oac mp3lame -lameopts [...]? Is there any 
special reason the example does not compress the sound?

Q3: Let's say I end up with a 1.400 MB .avi file. How do I manage to split that, so it fits on two CD's? Seems
obvious information, only I couldn't manage to find this one. (google only knew about transcode)

Cheers,

Niki Kovacs