On 15 Apr 2007 14:40:33 -0400, John Brown <johnbrown105@hotmail.com> wrote:

try adding -twolameopts br=128 -srate 44100 -af lavcresample=44100.

Since it is mono, you can probably use a lower bitrate and sample rate without affecting how it sounds. twolame --help will give you a lot of information about legal sample rates and legal bitrates for each supported sample rate.

Thanks, that was helpful. I did get mencoder to run to completion, and mplayer could play the file. Unfortunately, I ran into the usual old problem that the file will not play in XP. It is apparently not an audio problem. I tried several sampling rates and also "-oac copy" and "-nosound" to no avail. The full two-pass command I expected to work was: mencoder lizard.avi \ -oac twolame -twolameopts br=128 -srate 44100 -af lavcresample=44100 \ -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg1video:vbitrate=1000:mbd=2:trell:vpass=1 \ -o /dev/null mencoder lizard.avi \ -oac twolame -twolameopts br=128 -srate 44100 -af lavcresample=44100 \ -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg1video:vbitrate=1000:mbd=2:trell:vpass=2 \ -o lizard.mpg These lavc settings have produced files that play under XP when I have copied from DVDs. For some reason when I use them to reencode the AVI file from the digital camera, they fail. The original AVI plays anyway. I was just hoping to reduce its size by doing the video encoding with something better than MJPEG. Thanks again.