[MPlayer-dev-eng] [PATCH] Multiple files for MEncoder

[Oded Shimon]

On Tuesday 15 February 2005 16:49, Reynaldo H. Verdejo Pinochet wrote:
> maybe not _so_ easy, but and effort should be made to protect lusers from
> himselfs, imho checks should be done.
Can quite easily be added.just bloats the code a bit, something which I wanted 
to prevent for a first patch... This kind of thing can be added later if 
necessary.

> youre the one coding this, if you arent confident enough to asure this
> will work on every escenario, maybe you are rushing things up a little.
Well, I admit I don't understand and haven't tested some of the options... 
Reason for that is because most of them are about subtitles and DVD's.. I 
have neither...

> same with audio, some encodings take a while to complete, imagine an user
> waiting an hour or so, just to see they cannot make it trough the next
> file.. not nice at all, maybe you can just force the scale and inform
> the user youre going to do so?
The only thing that can be done is _ALWAYS_ adding the scale filter, or never 
putting at all. The only time I know when a frame is bad is only after it has 
been encoded, went through the filter chain, encoded and written to file - 
meaning adding the scale filter at this point is too late, and before it is 
premature. Adding the scale filter when the user doesn't want it/didn't ask 
for it is a BAD thing, it'll slow down the encode.

I do have an alternative, this is all still up to the user though - making a 
"-test" option. basically it would run through the entire encode by encoding 
only 1 frame from each file. The reason to not make this option is because 
the user can just do it himself with this:

mencoder -frames 1 -o /dev/null <same options for real encode>

Adding unnecessary extra options is just as bad. This tip could be added to 
the man page/HTML pages.

The design question here is a hard one, but basically if the user is dumb 
enough to try to merge 2 files before checking if they are compatible, then 
that's his problem. That's my belief, and most alternatives to this design 
are just too horrible.

Let me know what you would still like changed/corrected/checked...
When I'll have the time I'll fix the audio thing.

And, no offense to Reynaldo, but are you sure you are the best dev to be 
dealing with this patch?... I think it would be better if someone with more 
experience with mencoder.c would deal with it, but so far nobody except you 
has been answered... Again, no offense meant to you Reynaldo, I'm grateful 
you went over my e-mail/patch :)

- ods15