[MEncoder-users] How to encode old B&W movies efficiently ?

[RC]

On Sun, 22 Oct 2006 22:22:41 +0200
Emmanuel Merliot <emmanuel.merliot at free.fr> wrote:

> I tried recently to grab some old movies with the following option : 
> greyscale.
> Unfortunately, it appears that the result has the same size as a
> "coloured"  movie. I expected that this option could reduce its size,

I don't know why you expected that, as the man page rather clearly says
otherwise.

> as 256 colours  encoding is 8bits depth instead of 24bits depth ...
> In fact the result file is actually gray scaled !
> What's wrong ? Is there another option i missed ?

Different codecs NEED certain formats.    With MPEG-4 it appears you are
at least limited to YV12, I420, and IYUV.  I don't believe mencoder
includes any codecs which support 8bpp formats (other than uncompressed
raw).