[MEncoder-users] WMV problems

[Nicolas Hesler]

Rich Felker wrote:
> 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
>
>   
So it's not only broken when using lavf?.... but always broken??

Shouldn't there therefore be a HUGE asterisk in the docs somewhere??? Or 
some kind of list of things you can do in Mencoder that can't be 
accomplished otherwise with ffmpeg?  (ie dvd compliant streams) Why 
bother having docs on how to encode quicktime compatible h264 if ffmpeg 
can do a better job of it?