[MPlayer-users] Need help with deblocking (-vf pp)

[John Brown]

>From: RC <rcooley at spamcop.net>

> > I did not see a difference between no cmp and cmp = 3, but both were
> > better  than cmp = 2.
>
>Did you see that *cmp=3 is about an order of magnatude slower?  A good
>thing to keep in mind.

Yes, I did notice that.

> > 1) Some transitions  where one scene blends into the next (blocky
> > background)
>
>B-frames help a lot.
>
Now I need to find out what a B-frame is. I found a tutorial here:
http://bmrc.berkeley.edu/frame/research/mpeg/

Although officially I have given up, is there a particular site that you can 
recommend?

>Of course not, but at a fixed bitrate (especially at very low bitrates
>like you are trying to use), deblocking can make things more blocky.
>It's better to prevent blocking in the first place (as in denoising to
>make the video compress better without macroblock artifacts), and if
>necessary, use options like scplx_mask which won't destroy the video.


I just tried nr. nr and cmp defaults helped quite a bit.

>Then why use mencoder?  There are many, many frontends that will make
>the task much easier for a beginner.

The vast majority of the frontends listed at MPlayer HQ seem to be for 
Linux, or for ripping DVDs, usually to DivX. I am on Windows and I am making 
DVDs from existing movie files. I have tried one or two, but basically they 
let you select resolution, output file size and format. What I would need is 
to be able to select  "Anime/Claymation/Sci-Fi/Western/Romance/Grass 
Growing/Cheetah Pouncing on Blissfully Unaware Antelope". Or maybe it could 
perform some kind of analysis to dynamically determine the best options. 
Being able to graphically select options whose meaning I do not know would 
only save me the trouble of remembering and typing in cryptic mnemonics.

>Though the simple fact of the
>matter is that it's not easy to get 720x480 MPEG2 video to look good at
>such a low bitrate that you are trying to use.

Which is the conclusion to which I have arrived. Is there a ballpark 
estimate of what MPEG-II bitrate would give me the same quality as a given 
DX50 movie? I would like a way to know when I have probably done all I can.