[MPlayer-users] mencoder on slow CPU

[DEBERT Jean-Louis]

Eugene Morozov wrote:

>  I'm trying to encode TV programs on Celeron 466. I know
>  that it's a slow CPU, but it was possible to encode tv
>  programs with reasonable quality under windows using
>  software that came with the tuner. I've tried many
>  codecs supported by mencoder and their options but
>  either output is very ugly or encoding takes too much
>  CPU and mencoder produces bad file. Does anyone with
>  the older hardware can recommend suitable
>  mencoder options?

Since the CPU is slow, you had better restrict yourself
to "light" compression, i.e. mpeg1 or possibly mpeg2,
but definitely not any of the mpeg4 variants, which are
much more cpu-intensive. The resultant file will be 
somewaht bigger, but will be created faster ...


Better yet, _if_ you have disk space, why not capture
your TV programs without encoding (using mplayer -dumpstream)
and encode later. This way is best, because mplayer -dumpstream
doesn't consume much cpu, and for the later encoding pass 
you can use the best options, you have all the time you want.