[MEncoder-users] Flashvideo for YouTube using mencoder

[Corey Hickey]

Ben wrote:
>>  By the way, if you want lavc to meet your requested bitrate more
>>  precisely, investigate the vratetol option. This is more relevant with
>>  smaller videos.
> 
> That already looked interesting to me, but I find it hard to guess
> how tolerant I should set it. I hardly see any true-to-life examples
> for flashvideo (not in this list, or in the manual).
> Do you have an idea what to set vratetol to, on average, for,
> say, videos of minimum 3 to maximum 11 minutes ?
> For audio I need around ~96 kbit/s, so if the target is 349 kbit/s maximum,
> that leaves around 253 kbit/s for video.

I can't give you a certain answer on that. Try 2-pass encoding and
specify vbitrate=250 or something. Use a lower vbitrate if you'd like
more leeway.

Try vratetol=1000 or lower if you need to.

If mencoder is consistently under/overshooting specified bitrate, try a
lower vratetol or raise/lower vbitrate accordingly.

> Also, does anybody here have an opinion on using mencoder instead of ffmpeg
> directly? I've been using ffmpeg for encoding to flv, but it made huge mistakes
> on interpreting the source. For some reason mencoder takes better guesses
> for my sources (usually huffYUV or RAW RGB bitmap avi's). I also found the
> mencoder encodes a lot less blocky in color gradients. This might depend
> on the versions used, I have no idea how mencoder rates against ffmpeg
> regarding internal codec code.

lavc is part of ffmpeg, so the "internal codec code" is the same if you
use "mencoder -ovc lavc". The defaults for some parameters are
different, though.

I don't use ffmpeg much, but

> Where to find the best and latest Win32 or Win64 binaries for mencoder ?

Compile them yourself, or look through this page:
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/projects.html#windows

I cannot make any recommendations.

-Corey