[MEncoder-users] Status Line Incongruities

[James Hastings-Trew]

I posted this question the weekend, but it seems to have disappeared 
into the ether. I'm reposting it in a slightly edited form:

I'm encoding a video to x264 from a DVD source. The length of the video 
is 53 mins, 2 seconds, at a frame rate of 23.976. This means the 
resulting video file will have 76291 frames in it. This particular video 
takes around 200 minutes to encode with the settings I am using:
|
mencoder c:\temp\title.vob  -aid 128 -af volume=14.288 -sws 9 -of lavf 
-lavfopts format=mp4 -vf 
pullup,softskip,pp=lb,crop=720:480:0:0,scale=848:480,dsize=848:480,harddup,unsharp=l3x3:0.5 
-oac faac -faacopts mpeg=4:object=2:br=160:raw -channels 2 -srate 48000 
-ovc x264 -x264encopts 
crf=18:cqm=custom_matrix.cfg:me=umh:frameref=6:mixed_refs:subq=6:trellis=1:8x8dct:nofast_pskip:nocabac:global_header:level_idc=31:threads=2 
-ofps 24000/1001 -o temp.mp4 |

This means that the video is encoding at a rate of 6.36 frames per 
second. However, Mencoder's status line reports that it has processed 
190727 frames, at a rate of 16 frames per second. This is 2.5 times the 
number of frames in the video, and 2.5 times the actual frame rate it is 
encoding at.

Any idea why the status line is so woefully wrong in reporting how many 
frames it's working on, and at what speed? The time remaining 
calculation and the estimated file size seem to be correct. It is almost 
as if mencoder is treating the input frame rate as 60 frames per second 
- (24 x 2.5 = 60) which I guess means mencoder is counting each field of 
input before the pullup, as a frame?

Help me to understand this.