[MPlayer-users] silly question: where to get divx4?

[D Richard Felker III]

On Tue, Jan 28, 2003 at 09:02:21PM -0500, John Harrold wrote:
> [Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read DOCS/bugreports.html]

> Sometime in January D Richard Felker III assaulted the keyboard and produced:
> 
> | [Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read DOCS/bugreports.html]
> | On Mon, Jan 27, 2003 at 09:37:36PM -0500, John Harrold wrote:
> | > [Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read DOCS/bugreports.html]
> | 
> | > howdy.
> | > 
> | > i'm looking to reencode some stuff into divx4. i'm running redhat 7.3 and
> | > i believe i've installed the rpms located here:
> | > http://mirrors.sctpc.com/dominik/linux/pkgs/mplayer/
> | > 
> | > i've installed 
> | >  o mplayer-common
> | >  o mplayer
> | >  o all of the linux and win32 codecs
> | >  o mencoder
> | > 
> | > anyway. if someone could point me to a place where i could download a
> | > package or tarball i would be most appreciative.
> | 
> | The answer is, don't. Use libavcodec to encode mpeg4, which is the
> | same format "divx" uses; they just call it "divx" to sound elite.
> 
> when i used this codec it screwed up the resolution. the doc's say to use
> divx4 because it will preserve this information. that's the reason i was
> trying to get divx4 to work.

This is nonsense -- is that in the mplayer DOCS? If so, it needs to be
removed. No matter which encoder you use, if the source material
doesn't have square pixels (most DVD's and especially all VCD's and
SVCD's), you probably want to use -vop scale=w:h to scale to the right
size before encoding. If you're trying to get good results you should
also read up on how to properly crop and scale and use other advanced
encoding options.

There's also one other alternative: use -lavcopts aspect=x/y to set
the aspect in the mpeg4 header when encoding. However, at this time
only mplayer actually uses that value to prescale during playback; the
windows players and whatnot are too dumb and they ignore it.

Rich