[MPlayer-dev-eng] 3 pass encoding syntax poll

[Andreu Escudero]

> The man page never mentions four pass encoding and never refers to a pass
> beyond the third.  There is no way you could know, from the man page, that
> three pass actually means two or more passes.

For me, Nth pass means, exactly, Nth pass, where N can be 2, 3 or 768
if you want...
Someone who is able to do a good video encoding session using mencoder
is sure able to understand how the N-pass encoding works, it simple
refines the quantizer assignation a bit more for each pass... and so
you can do all the number of passes you want.


> > perhaps the reasonable thing to do is change the manual to something like:
> > 3       Nth pass (2 .. N passes of N pass encoding)
> 
> How about:
>   1     First pass of multi-pass encoding
>   3     Subsequent passes (2nd and up) of multi-pass encoding
> 
> Or:
>   1     Create a mutli-pass log file, but do not read one
>   2     Read a multi-pass log file, but do not write a new one
>   3     Read a multi-pass log file, and over-write it with a new one

Better:
1       First pass of multi-pass encoding
2       ALERT - Only for 2 pass encodings
         Second pass of 2 pass encoding
3       ALERT - For N pass encodings (where N >= 2)
         Subsequent passes (2nd and up) of multi-pass encoding
         The log file is overwriten (refined) for each pass.

> 
> > so the only point of two pass mode is removing the necessity to back
> > up the log file, because it gets overwriten using N pass mode (or
> 
> Sure would be simpler if three pass aka N pass mode didn't overwrite the log
> file, as then the artificial three pass vs two pass mode thing could be
> eliminated.
I disagree here, because the only way to do that is to create
different logfiles for each pass, that means leaving a lot of garbage
in your filesystem, and breaking compatibility for all scripts that
rely on a single log file after every pass for Nth pass encoding. That
means it wouldn't be simpler, but much more complicated.
It can't be simpler than it is now.

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