After reading all the mencoder docs I can find, I'm having a go at converting a DVD to DivX using the three-pass encoding referred to in encoding-tips.html. mplayer -vop cropdetect suggests "crop=720:432:0:72". If I use that with no scaling then I get a successful encode but the aspect ratio is wrong since it's a 16:9 DVD. If I add "scale=720:304" then mencoder prints: crop: bad position/width/height - cropped area is out of the original! then it segfaults. Platform is FreeBSD 4.8 using mplayer 0.90.0.110_4, which is the most recent port (unless it was updated in the last day). BTW a recent post mentioned that 3-pass encoding was buggy. Is this one of the known bugs? jim