[MPlayer-DOCS] [PATCH] Update x264's manpage section

[Loren Merritt]

On Mon, 13 Oct 2008, The Wanderer wrote:
> Diego Biurrun wrote:
>> On Mon, Oct 13, 2008 at 10:28:08PM +0200, Diego Biurrun wrote:
>>> On Mon, Oct 13, 2008 at 03:17:26PM +0200, Guillaume POIRIER wrote:
>>>
>>>> --- DOCS/man/en/mplayer.1	(revision 27751)
>>>> +++ DOCS/man/en/mplayer.1	(copie de travail)
>>>>  .IPs 7
>>>> -Enables rate-distortion optimization of motion vectors and intra modes. (best)
>>>> +Enables rate-distortion optimization of macroblock types in all frames.
>>>
>>> rate distortion, same below
>>
>> It seems like rate-distortion is the more common spelling, so scratch
>> that...
>
> There's probably a reason for that. By my understanding of the way
> grouping works in English, since you have an adjective+noun pair
> modifying a second noun, you need to join the first adjective to its
> noun somehow because the two of them effectively constitute a single
> unit; the hyphen is the standard way of doing that.
>
> That's absolutely not a formal rule as far as I'm aware, but it is my
> assessment based on an extended informal study of the subject.

I don't think you can parse it as an english phrase, it's math. "Rate" and 
"distortion" are both acting as variables (and I don't know whether that 
counts as noun, adjective, or something else, but whatever they are, 
they're the same type). The hyphen means "vs", though I would never 
expand it in writing nor speech. And the whole phrase is exactly the same 
form as "X-Y graph".
There are also variants with more terms, such as 
"rate-distortion-complexity optimization" which trades off between 3 
variables.

--Loren Merritt