[MPlayer-users] "Too many video packets in the buffer" playing a merged file

[Loren Merritt]

On Sat, 2 Oct 2004, D Richard Felker III wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 02, 2004 at 08:10:01PM +0300, Ville Saari wrote:
>>
>> The text in credits eats a horrible amount of bits, but a good encoder only
>> needs to encode the new lines appearing form the bottom and everything
>> else is just motion vectors. I just tested a bunch of movies by splitting
>> the credits to separate file and checking the bitrate and every single one
>> had less bitrate in the credits than in the rest of the movie! And I
>> certainly hadn't done anything special to the credits while encoding them.
>
> in general this is true. the only exception i can think of is when you
> have really fancy backgrounds and stuff behind the credits eating lots
> of bits, but the background still sucks enough that you don't want to
> waste bits on it. :)

That case happens more often than I'd like. And it doesn't take a very 
complex background to eat lots of bits from scrolling text. Especially if 
it's interlaced text on a telecined background, like too many anime dvds.
Even after deinterlacing, I've seen credits use 8x the bitrate of the 
movie (at constant qp).

BTW, I've seen large improvements from using qpel in credits, while qpel 
hurts compression in the main movie. Concatenating (avimerge) the two 
encodes works when decoded by libavcodec, but is it really legal mpeg4?

--Loren Merritt