[MPlayer-users] The best quality OSS mpeg2 encoder?

[Joe Friedrichsen]

RC wrote:

>On Fri, 09 Sep 2005 19:09:35 +0900
>Joe Friedrichsen <pengi.films at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>libavcodec is also used by mplayer/mencoder. Given that ffmpeg has
>>admitted having bitrate problems with mpeg-2, does that hold true for
>>mencoder? 
>>
>
>Where have the ffmpeg team admited bitrate problems?
>
>I'm quite sure there would be numerous possible workarounds for a
>problem like that.  n-th pass encoding, vqcomp/vqblur settings, vqmin/
>vqmax settings, etc. 
>
My main source is transcode's wiki 
(http://www.transcoding.org/cgi-bin/transcode?FFmpeg_Vs._Mpeg2enc):
"However, the rate control code (as of FFmpeg 0.4.9b1 and 2005/1/1 CVS) 
has a design flaw that can cause it to exceed the maximum bitrate 
allowed during the second pass, which will show up as "SCR underflow" or 
similar errors when multiplexing the video. According to the FFmpeg 
developers, a redesigned rate control system is under development."

And there seems to be some hinting at it near the bottom of 
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/DOCS/tech/encoding-tips.txt

The developer archives (http://mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/ffmpeg-devel/) 
don't go back to the beginning of this year, so it appears that I have 
to trust transcode as I couldn't find specific posts about the status of 
this alleged bug.

Joe