[MEncoder-users] Ripping dvd to mp4

[Erik Slagter]

James Hastings-Trew wrote:

> I am here to spread the heresy that, in my opinion based on the evidence 
> of my eyes alone, b-frames only help compression, not quality, so not 
> having them is no big loss if you are after a quality encode. I wouldn't 
> hang my hat on ffmpeg's output based on the fact that it can output 
> b-frames to an .mp4 stream. The advantages of Mencoder far outweigh this 
> one small disadvantage.

Did you also try b-pyramid and more reference frames? B-frames are a bit 
more useful in h264 than they were before.

Also, of course you are right, you don't need B-frames for quality. You 
don't even need P-frames. Even more, you don't need compression at all 
for that >:-)

And yeah, I'd like to have my material compressed somewhat, I now get 
commercial DVD's down to ~2.3 Gb without visible quality loss at all.