Manu J wrote:

Hi, Recently i encoded a DVD to Xvid using both Mencoder and VirtualDub and i found that VirtualDub gave a better quality for the same filesize.

Here is the command i used for mencoder. cat *.VOB | mencoder -vf crop=720:378:0:52,scale=640:272,pp=lb -ovc xvid -xvidencopts bitrate=900:me_quality=6:quant_type=mpeg:gmc:trellis:chroma_opt:chroma_me:hq_ac:vhq=3:autoaspect:max_bframes=3:qpel:pass=1 -oac mp3lame -lameopts q=3:vol=7 - -ofps 23.96 -o /dev/null

cat *.VOB | mencoder -vf crop=720:378:0:52,scale=640:272,pp=lb -ovc xvid -xvidencopts bitrate=900:me_quality=6:quant_type=mpeg:gmc:trellis:chroma_opt:chroma_me:hq_ac:vhq=3:autoaspect:max_bframes=3:qpel:pass=2 -oac mp3lame -lameopts q=3:vol=7 - -ofps 23.96 -o dch.avi

Now i tried many variations and there was never a significant change and atlast i got tired and i went with these options :-).Mencoder took much longer time to encode than virtualdub possibly because i enabled so many xvid options like gmc,qpel.

I forgot the settings for virtualdub but i just followed the doom9.org guide and used the same seetings.

Now some questions 1)Is there a way to speed mencoder up without losing quality ? I have only linux and i don't want to trouble my friend often

vhq=3 is always extremely slow on both windows and linux

2)Am i doing something wrong here especially with respect to scale and crop? Which should be done first?

they are in the right order, but are you sure you are using a linear blend deinterlacer and a bicubic scaler in vdub (as in the cli above)?

3)Is there any xvid setting that i missed which would have made a difference in quality? I tried enabling 4mv but mencoder said it's not a valid option though TFM says otherwise !

me_quality=6 implies 4mv. BTW are you sure you want trellis and 3 B frames? -ofps 23.96 is wrong: 24000/1001 (=23.976) is the right value

System and siftware details

Slackware linux 10 AMD Athlon 1700 MPlayer 1.0pre5try2-3.4.2 Wine 20041019 Xvid 1.0.2

Regards Manu