[MEncoder-users] many mencoder questions from a newbie

[Janos Szamosfalvi]

Howdy, 

I'm trying to use mencoder to create quality mp4's playable 
on a lowly Velocity Cruz T301 tablet, and I have a few questions 
about mencoder.   


First, I was looking for a download link on the mplayer site for the 
latest version of mencoder, but I couldn't find it.  
I have: "MEncoder Sherpya-SVN-r30521 (C) 2000-2010 MPlayer Team" 
Is there a newer version available somewhere?


In a log like below:
Pos:   2.7s     75f (55%)  8.81fps Trem:   0min   1mb  A-V:0.011 [1942:127]
Pos:   2.7s     76f (55%)  8.75fps Trem:   0min   1mb  A-V:0.014 [1961:128]
Pos:   2.8s     77f (55%)  8.72fps Trem:   0min   1mb  A-V:0.017 [1976:127]
what does the A-V section, and the numbers in the [ ] bracket mean? 


What do these telecine numbers mean?
telecine = 1.5  0.243 
telecine = 1.5  -0.054    
telecine = 1.0  -0.279
the first one is always 1.0 or 1.5 as far as I can see, 
the 2nd seems to be between -0.5 and 0.5 


Is there some document that describes the content of the x264 info at 
the end of the encoding?
x264 [info]: frame I:15    Avg QP:13.43  size: 25791  PSNR Mean Y:55.78 U:55.67 V:59.12 Avg:56.13 Global:49.73
x264 [info]: frame P:220   Avg QP:17.15  size:  7385  PSNR Mean Y:50.96 U:51.06 V:55.24 Avg:51.41 Global:47.31
[...] 
x264 [info]: ref B L1: 96.8%  3.2%
x264 [info]: SSIM Mean Y:0.9926010
x264 [info]: PSNR Mean Y:54.671 U:54.939 V:58.797 Avg:55.133 Global:47.369 kb/s:1521.26
I think I can guess some of these fields, but most aren't exactly 
clear to me.

Because the tablet I have appears to be a bit underpowered, it is
crashing on sections that (I presume) are encoded with higher 
bitrate, so I figured that I will use "vbv_maxrate" to set an 
upper limit about 10% above the average bitrate, but as far 
as I can see, it has no effect.  With a bitrate of 1500, 
I tried maxrate of 1800, 1700, 1600, 1500, 1400, 1200 but 
the resulting .mp4 files turned out to be identical....   
Any idea on why is that happening?   At least for the last 2, 
it should've just erred out.

Here are my commandlines for a 2 pass encoding:

mencoder Title4.mpg -ss 4 -of lavf -lavfopts format=mp4 -o /dev/null -ofps 30000/1001 -vf crop=720:464:0:8,scale=720:432,harddup -ovc x264 -x264encopts turbo:pass=1:bitrate=1500:subq=4:frameref=2:8x8dct:bframes=3:b_pyramid=normal:weight_b:keyint=30:vbv_maxrate=1600:threads=auto:psnr:ssim -srate 44100 -af format=s16le -oac mp3lame -lameopts cbr:br=128

mencoder Title4.mpg -ss 4 -of lavf -lavfopts format=mp4 -o Title4h.mp4 -ofps 30000/1001 -vf crop=720:464:0:8,scale=720:432,harddup -ovc x264 -x264encopts pass=2:bitrate=1500:subq=5:frameref=3:8x8dct:bframes=3:b_pyramid=normal:weight_b:keyint=30:vbv_maxrate=1600:threads=auto:psnr:ssim -srate 44100 -af format=s16le -oac mp3lame -lameopts cbr:br=128 

TIA