[MPlayer-DOCS] Mess in mencoder.xml's examples

[Guillaume Poirier]

Hi,
Diego Biurrun wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 21, 2005 at 11:13:13AM +0100, Torinthiel wrote:
> 
>>I've found that examples in mencoder.xml (and probably
>>encoding-guide.xml as well, but I haven't examined it yet) are in a bit
>>of mess. So:
>>
>>There are two examples of two-pass encoding. One with copying audio and
>>one with reencoding it. Can someone tell me why in the first output from
>>first pass goes to /dev/null and in the second to output.avi? IMHO it
>>should be /dev/null both.
> 
> 
> Can anybody with some encoding knowledge answer this?

Well, the idea is too keep only the video from the last pass of
multipass encode. Why is that? That's because the last pass produces a
video with greater quality that all the previous ones.
Why do you want to write the previous pass to /dev/null? Mainly because
you won't keep those files anyway (but keep in mind that even if the
video is written to /dev/null, the stat file is still written on disk),
and because that way you don't generate needless I/O.

Guillaume