[MEncoder-users] Happy with encoding results but wish better understanding

[RC]

On Wed, 21 Apr 2010 05:49:26 -0700
"Sue Morton" <zytb8phzgv at snkmail.com> wrote:

> What does 'trell' do vs. leaving it out, such that it 'helps'?  And
> what  is the 'help' it gives (less motion artifacts in video, helps
> sync video  with audio, etc.)?  

Start with a minimal mencoder command-line, and start adding options,
one-by-one, until you see what each changed option does...  Start with
-oac / -ovc options.  In short, a video encoding option certainly isn't
going to affect sync.

> I've done a lot of reading, and I'll go back to read  the man pages
> again, but I'm not really understanding what these  parameters 'do' --
> a pretty learning curve is still ahead of me I think  :-)

If you don't understand what quantization is, you're not going to
understand the explanation of trell in the man page.  If you really want
to have some idea what you're doing, you need to learn the fundamentals
of multimedia encoding first.  

Though I'm doubtlessly biased, I would recomend starting with the MPEG-1
article on Citizendium:  http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/MPEG-1  

The similar article on Wikipedia hasn't been brutalized into uselessness
yet, but it's undoubtedly gotten worse over time.

-- 
Ha. I'm the idiot.