Apologies for jumping straight in with questions, but I only discovered this site this evening, whilst hunting for the more up to date version of AVIConverter

It appears that both the new version of this software, and the one I'd used previously some time ago use MEncoder to do their dirty work, simply passing various command line options to it.

Someone looks to have done some work on tweaking the options to suit PAL source material etc, but I'm (very) familiar with MPlayer and MEncoder and fancy going a bit further. My questions, therefore, are this:

Are people interested in more precisely tuned MEncoder settings?
Are they only interested in those ones that can be used from within AVIConverter? Or are they willing to use the command line?
Has anyone already done some work on this sort of thing? What worked and what didn't?
In particular, did anyone do some comparissons betwenn lavc's xvid encoder and the external (although statically linked) xvidenc library?
Do people have a "maximum processing time" in mind? Or should I feel free to add in multiple video filters, time consuming xvidenc options to get every bit of quality per megabyte?

Anyone with any requests, suggestions, moral support, assistance or opinions is more than welcome to chip in before I set to work

Hi Spheric,

I'm not so familiar with the parameters of MEncoder, but able and willing to use the comandline. The acknowledge of working parameters or not will be very helpful!

Did you discoverd the alternative program called viDrop from the author lokster ? You could find it here in the Download-Section "Tools". IMO its much better then any version of AV(i)Converter i've found until today.
I've written "the 50 Presets 4 viDrop", you could find them under Tools too. This Presets should be optimized too.

Thank you for your helping hand and regards from Germany,
lca77

Im aware that there are a few alternative programs around, and am planning on trying them properly before diving in with the mencoder work.

My first priority is to discover why it is that my (and I assume, other people's) players sometimes lose a-v sync in high motion scenes. Im currently guessing that its to do with large frame sizes, which may offer us the possibility of eliminating the problem.

Thanks for the welcome, lca77, and I'll be sure to check your viDrop presets out

spheric wrote (View Post): › ... Are people interested in more precisely tuned MEncoder settings?... Anyone with any requests, suggestions, moral support, assistance or opinions is more than welcome to chip in before I set to work

Greetings.
I believe I could use some suggestions. I use ViDrop and in it you have the option to create batch jobs. That is when one can see all the command lines(here is an example: mencoder "D:\jay.leno.2008.07.11.michael.caine_converted.avi" -idx -forceidx -ovc xvid -xvidencopts bitrate=250:me_quality=6:max_bframes=0:quant_type=h263:turbo:nochroma_me:notrellis:vhq=0 -vf-add scale=-2:256 -vf-add crop=320:256 -vf-add expand=320:256:-1:-1:1 -vf-add eq2=1.1:1:0:1.2:::: -ofps 25 -oac mp3lame -lameopts cbr:br=128:mode=1 -af volnorm=2:0.25 -af extrastereo=2.5 -srate 44100 -o "D:\\jay.leno.2008.07.11.michael.caine_converted_converted.avi" -vf-add harddup -noodml -of avi) that would be used for each video file due for conversion.
Well, here I start with some questions:
Q1. If manually modify the command lines from notrellis to trellis and nocroma_me to croma_me, does that have any real and positive impact on the process?
Q2. Mencoder uses only 1 processor my Core 2 Duo computer that actually makes the whole process longer...can this be improved?

And of course any other suggestions would be welcomed.

I am looking forward to hearing from you.

Best regards.

the_provider wrote (View Post): › Greetings. I believe I could use some suggestions. I use ViDrop and in it you have the option to create batch jobs. That is when one can see all the command lines(here is an example: mencoder "D:\jay.leno.2008.07.11.michael.caine_converted.avi" -idx -forceidx -ovc xvid -xvidencopts bitrate=250:me_quality=6:max_bframes=0:quant_type=h263:turbo:nochroma_me:notrellis:vhq=0 -vf-add scale=-2:256 -vf-add crop=320:256 -vf-add expand=320:256:-1:-1:1 -vf-add eq2=1.1:1:0:1.2:::: -ofps 25 -oac mp3lame -lameopts cbr:br=128:mode=1 -af volnorm=2:0.25 -af extrastereo=2.5 -srate 44100 -o "D:\\jay.leno.2008.07.11.michael.caine_converted_converted.avi" -vf-add harddup -noodml -of avi) that would be used for each video file due for conversion. Well, here I start with some questions: Q1. If manually modify the command lines from notrellis to trellis and nocroma_me to croma_me, does that have any real and positive impact on the process? Q2. Mencoder uses only 1 processor my Core 2 Duo computer that actually makes the whole process longer...can this be improved? And of course any other suggestions would be welcomed. I am looking forward to hearing from you. Best regards.

trellis slows things down, but doesn't need any extra support for playback (unlike things like qpel) so unless you're in a hurry, I'd turn it on.

More recent builds of xvidenc allow threads=2 to be added to the -xvidencopts for multithreaded encoding: I'm unsure whether this scales up to 3/4 or beyond

spheric wrote (View Post): › ... I'd turn it on.

So, to put it in other words, manually changing the script from notrellis to trellis is, in fact a good thing, it improves the quality of the video file, correct?
What about changing from nocroma_me to croma_me, it has the same improving effect?

I am also curious to know if the is any command that can be added to the script in order to split the resulting .avi in a number of smaller .avi files, would you know anything about this matter?

Thank you in advance.
Best regards.

Hey, Spheric, have you tried viDrop yet? It sh!ts all over any of the AVConverter things. I get good results just by selecting the Rockchip preset and modifying it to suit.

I would be interested in what options I might put in the MEncoder Options line to get tbe filesize as small as possible. I've got them down to around 100 MB per movie by using 2-Pass encode at about 90 kbit/s. The audio I do at 48 kbit/s which isn't exactly hi-fi but sounds good enough to me. Any lower and it starts to get artifacty.