[MPlayer-users] advice on mencoder options

[anton]

Thanks heaps so far, just a few more qs...
OK, so lets say I'm a stingy B'stard and I want to scale. What is the 
best scaling to use? I see there is -vf scale=... but there is also -x, 
-y and -xy, and afaict this can be used in tandem -zoom. The Digilander 
artiticle also mentions that -sws should be used to improve the quality 
of the scale. Frankly I'm lost. I would have thought that there would 
have been a good reason to keep the aspect ratio, but that is on the 
assumption that a movie is just frames full of pixels one after another, 
which .avi and .mpeg are clearly not. I used to use vidomi and that had 
an option of scaling by percent. I thought that that is what the -xy 
did, but that was from reading the man pages from 0.90 or 0.91. 1.0pre2 
baffles me! Is there an equivalent to scaling by percent? If so is there 
any point? Can I just scale to 640:360, regardless of whether the source 
is 4:3 or widescreen? I realise I can show the movie in other aspects so 
maybe I should just do my own percent scale? (remembering to leave it at 
/16...)
This is genuinely a case of me being a dumbarse newbie, and not lazy. I 
have read all I can find...
Thanks again.
Anton

>mencoder -mc 0 -noskip -skiplimit 0 -ovc lavc -lavcopts
>vcodec=mpeg4:vhq:trell:mbd=2:vmax_b_frames=1:v4mv:vb_strategy=0:cmp=2:subcmp=2:precmp=2:predia=1:dia=1:vme=4
>  
>
>It gives better quality at low bitrate, at high bitrate it destroys details
>in the video.
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>