[MEncoder-users] article about converting video to DVD

[Carl Eugen Hoyos]

Grozdan <neutrino8 <at> gmail.com> writes:

> Please stop advertising ffmpeg whenever someone mentions
> mencoder.Whether you like it or not, mencoder still has a lot of users
> and a good part of them prefer it over ffmpeg for various reasons.
> You're starting to sound like a troll whenever a mencoder topic pops
> up

Sorry for this misunderstanding.

I am one of the (very) few people (approximately three) that will try to
immediately fix MEncoder compilation problems (these happen not so seldom
because FFmpeg developers are basically "allowed" to break MPlayer/MEncoder
compilation at any time).
I (and the others) will probably continue to do so for a long time.

For several years, there is nobody actively working on MEncoder, so neither has
the general codebase seen any cleanups, nor have any (possible) bugs been fixed
in the muxers, afair.

Most people who post on this mailing list for the first time sound as if they
are completely unaware of this, which is quite understandable, given that
MPlayer, sharing a lot of its codebase with MEncoder, is actively maintained.
(Additionally, some of them seem to have never heard of FFmpeg.)

At the same time, those people typically post because they have a problem. If
the problem is due to MEncoder (and not some "wrong" usage), it is VERY unlikely
that the problem gets fixed.

Not all FFmpeg bugs are fixed immediately (actually the opposite), but there are
many active developers (definitely more than a dozen, and I can't count them
atm), patches are sent every day. Some of these patches have an impact on
MEncoder (not necessarily positive!), but they are nearly never examined if they
fix or break anything in MEncoder.

Regarding the (two?) missing features:
FFmpeg's maintainer has repeatedly stated that he will not refuse a win32 binary
decoder loader. (Nobody seems to be working on this, though.)
Filters are ported at this very moment, Stefano might be happy about some
bug-reports, as said, two people (who I believe did not send patches for MPlayer
or FFmpeg before) ported filters this week (= sent usable patches, they are both
still under review atm). For many of the requested filters, this won't be more
difficult. (I have no idea how hard pullup will be, but to my surprise, nobody
asked for it at least in this discussion: Are they possibly using yadif for
inverse telecine?)

Note that this is not about anybody wanting to stop MEncoder development: It is
only about limited man-power in projects (FFmpeg, MPlayer/MEncoder) that are
seen as very, very difficult to contribute to (for several reasons). The
available man-power goes nearly exclusively into FFmpeg development (and a bit
of testing with MPlayer), and this is good, because everybody (including users
of vlc etc.) profits.

I will continue to hint at FFmpeg, please give me advice if you want the
standard mail re-worded, Carl Eugen