[MPlayer-users] mencoder feature requests

[Matthew Stephenson]

The following is a list of mencoder features I would find useful in the
next release of mplayer - apologies if they have already been addressed,
or are infeasible to implement - I haven't a detailed knowledge of the
internel workings of mplayer.

I am aware of, and have used, the modified mencoder from the posts
entitled "split, crop in mencoder (modific BUTT UGLY)", and this was quite
useful, but I have some other features I'd like to see.


-ss

as per the aforementioned modification, to allow encoding to start at a
specified point.


-skipframes

It would be very useful to be able to specify a number of frames to skip
at the beginning of an encode. -ss only permits seeking to positions with
a 10 second resolution - eg: -ss 0:01 would start at position 10 seconds,
rather than 1. I appreciate that seeking has been a tricky issue with
mplayer, so if this is difficult to implement, apologies. It would
nevertheless be useful.


-delay

the -delay option in mplayer to fix audio sync would be much appreciated
in mencoder, as it would allow poorly sync'd files or dvds to be
corrected. If this could be used in conjunction with -ovc copy and -oac
copy, so much the better.


-time

to perform an encode of a certain length of video, it is currently
necessary to note the framerate, multiply the fps by the desired number of
seconds, and use -frames. It should be trivial to implement a -time option
which does this automatically, perhaps with a format similar to -ss
hh:mm:ss.sss


multiple input files / concatenation

The ability to seamlessly encode multiple input files (assuming same
resolution, bitrate, etc) into a single output file.


separate audio/video input files

I believe this is already being addressed, but I will include it here as
well. -dumpvideo and -dumpaudio allow the separate streams to be dumped -
is there not a way to recombine them? If so, would this be a way to
perform the "multiple input files / concatenation" described above, by
dumping the streams of the various files, "catting" them together, and
recombining the concatenated audio and video files?



Apologies if these requests are too complex to be feasible, otherwise I
look forward to seeing them in mencoder.

Matthew