[MPlayer-users] Mencoder: are the displayed bitrates accurate?

[Levente Novák]

I would like to encode with a given maximal video bitrate (say 2500 
kbps), what mencoder with a 2-pass run seems to perform without problems 
(all bitrate values displayed during the encoding process are below this 
threshold). However, if the resulting AVI or MPEG is loaded into 
avidemux2 (which has a nice bitrate histogram tool), this latter shows 
that some frames are apparently encoded with much higher kbps values 
than 2500.

My question is: which program is right and which one wrong? Is mencoder 
taking into account all the possible frame types (e.g. I, P, B frames) 
when displaying the kbps values? Or is it some kind of averaged value?

My idea is to measure the bitrate with other software, to know which 
values are correct. I was told to try bitrate viewer (for windows), do 
you know other utilities able to show the per-frame bitrate of a file?

Levente