[MEncoder-users] 2pass: auto-calculation of bitrate?

[Larry S. Stotler]

----Original Message-----
From: James Hastings-Trew <jimht at shaw.ca>

>Mmm.. no, I suggested a sub-sample approach, which has worked out very
>well for me, in practice. It takes about 2 minutes to take several
>sub-samples of the movie at regular intervals and derive a target
>bitrate based on the results, followed by a one-pass encode that gives
>very good results, fairly close to the target file size, in a 
reasonable
>amount of time.

The issue I have with that is the time it takes to look at each movie 
and try to figure out what the best bitrate is and my lack of 
understanding of how to achive that.  I jut re-encode everything to  
pass xvid at 1536 bitrate.  Yes, the file sizes are bigger, but so are 
the drives now.  I've got a 250gig in my laptop, and at an average size 
of 1-1.5gb, that's till around 150 full movies if I want that many.

>A second pass would be nice, but we all don't have
>8-core Xeon workstations. ;)

Hmmm, I've always done 2 passes, even when I was jut using an old dual 
xeon 500Mhz system.  I don't do x264 mainly because I've already done 
so many in xvid and because it takes 2-3 times a long as xvid.  I do 
now have an E1200 overclocked to 3.2Ghz, and average about 110 first 
pass and 50-55 second pass.  But I also don't encode the audio on pass 
1 and I output it to /dev/null since I don't need to save that pass 
anyway.