[MEncoder-users] WMV problems

[Rich Felker]

On Wed, Jan 02, 2008 at 12:26:54PM -0500, Nicolas Hesler wrote:
> 
> > If you want nice encoding to containers other than avi, use the ffmpeg
> > program itself, not mencoder. The only reason to use mencoder should
> > be its filters, which you're not using. Otherwise ffmpeg is much much
> > better.
> >
> > Rich
> >   
> Is this true?  ffmpeg does a better job of transcoding except when 
> container is avi and using filters???

Well that's not quite an accurate way of expressing it, but yes. The
gory details:

1. MEncoder has lots of features ffmpeg lacks, mainly a large
   collection of filters you can use to process your audio and video.

BUT

2. MEncoder is extremely broken, but somewhat less-broken when the
   output format is AVI, since it was originally designed only for
   AVI. Basically it uses all other output formats via a layer of "AVI
   emulation" which you can imagine is NOT a good idea. Almost all of
   the other brokenness is in a/v sync and frame timing issues, and
   the results range from files which are "mostly correct" to
   "horribly out of sync". "Fully correct" is almost never possible
   especially for nasty input formats like wmv.

3. MEncoder also has a very nice mpeg muxer which may be better at
   generating DVD- and VCD-compliant streams than the lavf one. But
   sadly it's tucked away behind the badness of MEncoder's core...
   Still if you know what you're doing it can sometimes be useful.

Rich