[MPlayer-users] MPEG4 Low-Motion Quality

[James Board]

> I think he meant input codec is MPEG-2.

Yes, the input files are MPEG-2, which was produced by the CCE encoder from analog TV.

> If you think you have posterization and this is analog TV,
> try denoise. 
> I like denoise3d but there is some tinkering that can be
> done. It can 
> improve compression quality dramatically.  Like Eugen
> said, you need to 
> use the same options on first and subsequent passes. What
> resolution is 
> this? With 4Mbits and 720/480/576 you should get some
> really good quality.

Yes, I read the mencoder documentation, and it told me to use different options for the first and second pass.  Look:
    http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/menc-feat-mpeg4.html

The video resolution is 480x480 and the quality of the source MPEG2 is fine.  I'd like to be able to maintain that quality when transcoding to MPEG-4.  In fact, MPEG-4 is supposed to be much better than MPEG-2, so I was hoping to maintain the MPEG-2 quality at 50% of the bit rate.