[MEncoder-users] Encoding animation without shuttering

[Reimar Döffinger]

On 20 Feb 2012, at 22:13, "Tomasz Jamroszczak" <jamrok at gazeta.pl> wrote:
>    Hello.
>    I'm new on this list, and new to video encoding.  However I'm responsible for a presentation of some animations, and every now and then I need to encode something.  Recently I've received 6 minutes animation weighting 5GB, in 900x600 resolution, but the animation is quite static.  What's funny, it does look good when played with Media Player Classic.  Mplayer can play only two seconds, then stops.  I need to make the file smaller.  I managed to encode it to 76MB, but the problem is, I'm experiencing jittering during scene switch (fade-in, fade-out) and scrolling of whole view.  Size is not that important (well, it can't be 1GB/s), but I really need smooth video.  I'd rather like not to have compression artifacts.
> 
>    My encoding options are following:
> 
> mencoder in.mov -o out.avi -ovc x264 -x264encopts subq=9:crf=21:keyint=250:partitions=all:8x8dct:me=umh:frameref=5:bframes=5:weight_b:deblock=1,1:cabac:qp_min=18:qp_max=51:ip_factor=1.4:pb_factor=1.4:qcomp=0.6:direct_pred=auto:me_range=16:chroma_me:mixed_refs:trellis=2:deadzone_inter=21:deadzone_intra=11:nofast_pskip:dct_decimate:nr=0:nointerlaced:psnr:ref=10 -oac pcm
> 
>    I have to admit, I don't understand most of the options.  What can I do, to encode non-choppy video?

Not sure what you mean by "jittering", but please use x264 profiles, like "slow" instead of all those options (except for crf, that one you'll still need).
Especially setting qp_min is just wrong when you want high quality and don't care much about size.
Also crf=21 is rather high for your purposes.
If whatever you use to play back supports it, you should probably also encode to 10 bit, it should give better quality especially with animation.
Though honestly with 6 minutes of 900x600 the only thing you probably _need_ to do is get rid of all the really horrible options and set a low crf value.
Even MPEG-2 would manage to do what you want without effort (using qscale=2) I'm quite convinced (DVDs are MPEG-2 and store over 100 minutes in 4 GB in good quality with lots of audio tracks).