[MPlayer-users] Nobody here who can help with cutting black borders away?

[Rainer Hantsch]

Hi, Nico Sabbi!

On Tue, 27 Apr 2004, Nico Sabbi wrote:
| if no one answered there will be a reason, right?

Very interesting point of view. :-/
I dont' see it this way, but let me explain below...

| to crop you need to use -vf crop=...    read the man page for details;
| in any case  you can't crop without re-encoding, so I suggest to store
| the original recording as a lossless format, such as ffv1 or huffyuv
| (again,  man  mplayer, man ffmpeg, ffmpeg -formats to get the list of
| codecs)

Thanks for the information. In fact, I shall repeat doing what I did 1 day
long: Trying to understand a man page which is not really to understand...
You are joking, right?  :)


About man-page and documentation:
---------------------------------
man-page:
   I only see a long listing of options in the man page, going over 33 pages
   A4 and not very clear to read and/or understand. Also, the man page is a
   total mixture between mplayer and mencoder. Because this two products use
   only a part of options (each), this is causing a lot of confusion.
   The man page is possibly useful when you _know_ what you want to do and
   you only need a final -very litte- info (syntax) to get it work, but
   this is definitely no _documentation_, it's nothing else than a listing
   of optins with a very brief explanation.
   So the man page is everything, but NOT USEFUL for learning how to use
   mencoder/mplayer.

HTML-Doc:
   In addition, there is a HTML "manual" available in several languages,
   which slightly scratches the surface of some trivial ways of using
   mencoder. This part goes over 3 pages A4 and shows primarily a very
   trivial way of converting a DVD into a divx in 2 pass, and how to
   (theoretically) repair a damaged avi and how to paste two AVI-files
   (and which actually does not really work).
   Because of the extreme number of options I am sure that 30 pages will
   not be sufficient for mencoder!
   I would possibly reduce to one language (english) and invest more time
   into completing and updating this manual to make it a real USER GUIDE,
   which also shows with many examples how to use mplayer/mencoder for
   multiple purposes.

Conclusion:
So I must currently say, that there is currently nothing available which is
worth to be named DOCUMENTATION or USER GUIDE and will be really helping a
newcomer to LEARN using mencoder. And exactly this leads into my situation
(and I am sure that I am not the only one!) that I can choose between doing a
stupid "trial and error" (calculate by yourself how many possible combinations
until - hopefully soon - an acceptable result is found), or asking in the
mplayer newsgroup.


mfg

  Ing. Rainer Hantsch