One frequently asked question is "How do I make the highest quality rip for a given size?". Another question is "How do I make the highest quality DVD rip possible? I do not care about file size, I just want the best quality." The latter question is perhaps at least somewhat wrongly posed. After all, if you do not care about file size, why not simply copy the entire MPEG-2 video stream from the the DVD? Sure, your AVI will end up being 5GB, give or take, but if you want the best quality and do not care about size, this is certainly your best option. In fact, the reason you want to transcode a DVD into MPEG-4 is specifically because you do care about file size. It is difficult to offer a cookbook recipe on how to create a very high quality DVD rip. There are several factors to consider, and you should understand these details or else you are likely to end up disappointed with your results. Below we will investigate some of these issues, and then have a look at an example. We assume you are using libavcodec to encode the video, although the theory applies to other codecs as well. If this seems to be too much for you, you should probably use one of the many fine frontends that are listed in the MEncoder section of our related projects page. That way, you should be able to achieve high quality rips without too much thinking, because most of those tools are designed to take clever decisions for you. Before you even think about encoding a movie, you need to take several preliminary steps. The first and most important step before you encode should be determining what type of content you are dealing with. If your source material comes from DVD or broadcast/cable/satellite TV, it will be stored in one of two formats: NTSC for North America and Japan, PAL for Europe, etc. It is important to realize, however, that this is just the formatting for presentation on a television, and often does not correspond to the original format of the movie. Experience shows that NTSC material is a lot more difficult to encode, because there more elements to identify in the source. In order to produce a suitable encode, you need to know the original format. Failure to take this into account will result in various flaws in your encode, including ugly combing (interlacing) artifacts and duplicated or even lost frames. Besides being ugly, the artifacts also harm coding efficiency: You will get worse quality per unit bitrate. Here is a list of common types of source material, where you are likely to find them, and their properties: Standard Film: Produced for theatrical display at 24fps. PAL video: Recorded with a PAL video camera at 50 fields per second. A field consists of just the odd- or even-numbered lines of a frame. Television was designed to refresh these in alternation as a cheap form of analog compression. The human eye supposedly compensates for this, but once you understand interlacing you will learn to see it on TV too and never enjoy TV again. Two fields do not make a complete frame, because they are captured 1/50 of a second apart in time, and thus they do not line up unless there is no motion. NTSC Video: Recorded with an NTSC video camera at 60000/1001 fields per second, or 60 fields per second in the pre-color era. Otherwise similar to PAL. Animation: Usually drawn at 24fps, but also comes in mixed-framerate varieties. Computer Graphics (CG): Can be any framerate, but some are more common than others; 24 and 30 frames per second are typical for NTSC, and 25fps is typical for PAL. Old Film: Various lower framerates. Movies consisting of frames are referred to as progressive, while those consisting of independent fields are called either interlaced or video - though this latter term is ambiguous. To further complicate matters, some movies will be a mix of several of the above. The most important distinction to make between all of these formats is that some are frame-based, while others are field-based. Whenever a movie is prepared for display on television (including DVD), it is converted to a field-based format. The various methods by which this can be done are collectively referred to as "telecine", of which the infamous NTSC "3:2 pulldown" is one variety. Unless the original material was also field-based (and the same fieldrate), you are getting the movie in a format other than the original. PAL 2:2 pulldown: The nicest of them all. Each frame is shown for the duration of two fields, by extracting the even and odd lines and showing them in alternation. If the original material is 24fps, this process speeds up the movie by 4%. PAL 2:2:2:2:2:2:2:2:2:2:2:3 pulldown: Every 12th frame is shown for the duration of three fields, instead of just two. This avoids the 4% speedup issue, but makes the process much more difficult to reverse. It is usually seen in musical productions where adjusting the speed by 4% would seriously damage the musical score. NTSC 3:2 telecine: Frames are shown alternately for the duration of 3 fields or 2 fields. This gives a fieldrate 2.5 times the original framerate. The result is also slowed down very slightly from 60 fields per second to 60000/1001 fields per second to maintain NTSC fieldrate. NTSC 2:2 pulldown: Used for showing 30fps material on NTSC. Nice, just like 2:2 PAL pulldown. There are also methods for converting between NTSC and PAL video, but such topics are beyond the scope of this guide. If you encounter such a movie and want to encode it, your best bet is to find a copy in the original format. Conversion between these two formats is highly destructive and cannot be reversed cleanly, so your encode will greatly suffer if it is made from a converted source. When video is stored on DVD, consecutive pairs of fields are grouped as a frame, even though they are not intended to be shown at the same moment in time. The MPEG-2 standard used on DVD and digital TV provides a way both to encode the original progressive frames and to store the number of fields for which a frame should be shown in the header of that frame. If this method has been used, the movie will often be described as "soft-telecined", since the process only directs the DVD player to apply pulldown to the movie rather than altering the movie itself. This case is highly preferable since it can easily be reversed (actually ignored) by the encoder, and since it preserves maximal quality. However, many DVD and broadcast production studios do not use proper encoding techniques but instead produce movies with "hard telecine", where fields are actually duplicated in the encoded MPEG-2. The procedures for dealing with these cases will be covered later in this guide. For now, we leave you with some guides to identifying which type of material you are dealing with: If MPlayer prints that the framerate has changed to 24000/1001 when watching your movie, and never changes back, it is almost certainly progressive content that has been "soft telecined". If MPlayer shows the framerate switching back and forth between 24000/1001 and 30000/1001, and you see "combing" at times, then there are several possibilities. The 24000/1001 fps segments are almost certainly progressive content, "soft telecined", but the 30000/1001 fps parts could be either hard-telecined 24000/1001 fps content or 60000/1001 fields per second NTSC video. Use the same guidelines as the following two cases to determine which. If MPlayer never shows the framerate changing, and every single frame with motion appears combed, your movie is NTSC video at 60000/1001 fields per second. If MPlayer never shows the framerate changing, and two frames out of every five appear combed, your movie is "hard telecined" 24000/1001fps content. If you never see any combing, your movie is 2:2 pulldown. If you see combing alternating in and out every half second, then your movie is 2:2:2:2:2:2:2:2:2:2:2:3 pulldown. If you always see combing during motion, then your movie is PAL video at 50 fields per second. MPlayer can slow down movie playback with the -speed option or play it frame-by-frame. Try using -speed 0.2 to watch the movie very slowly or press the "." key repeatedly to play one frame at a time and identify the pattern, if you cannot see it at full speed. It is possible to encode your movie at a wide range of qualities. With modern video encoders and a bit of pre-codec compression (downscaling and denoising), it is possible to achieve very good quality at 700 MB, for a 90-110 minute widescreen movie. Furthermore, all but the longest movies can be encoded with near-perfect quality at 1400 MB. There are three approaches to encoding the video: constant bitrate (CBR), constant quantizer, and multipass (ABR, or average bitrate). The complexity of the frames of a movie, and thus the number of bits required to compress them, can vary greatly from one scene to another. Modern video encoders can adjust to these needs as they go and vary the bitrate. In simple modes such as CBR, however, the encoders do not know the bitrate needs of future scenes and so cannot exceed the requested average bitrate for long stretches of time. More advanced modes, such as multipass encode, can take into account the statistics from previous passes; this fixes the problem mentioned above. Most codecs which support ABR encode only support two pass encode while some others such as x264, Xvid and libavcodec support multipass, which slightly improves quality at each pass, yet this improvement is no longer measurable nor noticeable after the 4th or so pass. Therefore, in this section, two pass and multipass will be used interchangeably. In each of these modes, the video codec (such as libavcodec) breaks the video frame into 16x16 pixel macroblocks and then applies a quantizer to each macroblock. The lower the quantizer, the better the quality and higher the bitrate. The method the movie encoder uses to determine which quantizer to use for a given macroblock varies and is highly tunable. (This is an extreme over-simplification of the actual process, but the basic concept is useful to understand.) When you specify a constant bitrate, the video codec will encode the video, discarding detail as much as necessary and as little as possible in order to remain lower than the given bitrate. If you truly do not care about file size, you could as well use CBR and specify a bitrate of infinity. (In practice, this means a value high enough so that it poses no limit, like 10000Kbit.) With no real restriction on bitrate, the result is that the codec will use the lowest possible quantizer for each macroblock (as specified by vqmin for libavcodec, which is 2 by default). As soon as you specify a low enough bitrate that the codec is forced to use a higher quantizer, then you are almost certainly ruining the quality of your video. In order to avoid that, you should probably downscale your video, according to the method described later on in this guide. In general, you should avoid CBR altogether if you care about quality. With constant quantizer, the codec uses the same quantizer, as specified by the vqscale option (for libavcodec), on every macroblock. If you want the highest quality rip possible, again ignoring bitrate, you can use vqscale=2. This will yield the same bitrate and PSNR (peak signal-to-noise ratio) as CBR with vbitrate=infinity and the default vqmin of 2. The problem with constant quantizing is that it uses the given quantizer whether the macroblock needs it or not. That is, it might be possible to use a higher quantizer on a macroblock without sacrificing visual quality. Why waste the bits on an unnecessarily low quantizer? Your CPU has as many cycles as there is time, but there is only so many bits on your hard disk. With a two pass encode, the first pass will rip the movie as though it were CBR, but it will keep a log of properties for each frame. This data is then used during the second pass in order to make intelligent decisions about which quantizers to use. During fast action or high detail scenes, higher quantizers will likely be used, and during slow moving or low detail scenes, lower quantizers will be used. Normally, the amount of motion is much more important than the amount of detail. If you use vqscale=2, then you are wasting bits. If you use vqscale=3, then you are not getting the highest quality rip. Suppose you rip a DVD at vqscale=3, and the result is 1800Kbit. If you do a two pass encode with vbitrate=1800, the resulting video will have higher quality for the same bitrate. Since you are now convinced that two pass is the way to go, the real question now is what bitrate to use? The answer is that there is no single answer. Ideally you want to choose a bitrate that yields the best balance between quality and file size. This is going to vary depending on the source video. If size does not matter, a good starting point for a very high quality rip is about 2000Kbit plus or minus 200Kbit. For fast action or high detail source video, or if you just have a very critical eye, you might decide on 2400 or 2600. For some DVDs, you might not notice a difference at 1400Kbit. It is a good idea to experiment with scenes at different bitrates to get a feel. If you aim at a certain size, you will have to somehow calculate the bitrate. But before that, you need to know how much space you should reserve for the audio track(s), so you should rip those first. You can compute the bitrate with the following equation: bitrate = (target_size_in_Mbytes - sound_size_in_Mbytes) * 1024 * 1024 / length_in_secs * 8 / 1000 For instance, to squeeze a two-hour movie onto a 702MB CD, with 60MB of audio track, the video bitrate will have to be: (702 - 60) * 1024 * 1024 / (120*60) * 8 / 1000 = 740kbps Due to the nature of MPEG-type compression, there are various constraints you should follow for maximal quality. MPEG splits the video up into 16x16 squares called macroblocks, each composed of 4 8x8 blocks of luma (intensity) information and two half-resolution 8x8 chroma (color) blocks (one for red-cyan axis and the other for the blue-yellow axis). Even if your movie width and height are not multiples of 16, the encoder will use enough 16x16 macroblocks to cover the whole picture area, and the extra space will go to waste. So in the interests of maximizing quality at a fixed file size, it is a bad idea to use dimensions that are not multiples of 16. Most DVDs also have some degree of black borders at the edges. Leaving these in place will hurt quality a lot in several ways. MPEG-type compression is highly dependent on frequency domain transformations, in particular the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), which is similar to the Fourier transform. This sort of encoding is efficient for representing patterns and smooth transitions, but it has a hard time with sharp edges. In order to encode them it must use many more bits, or else an artifact known as ringing will appear. The frequency transform (DCT) takes place separately on each macroblock (actually each block), so this problem only applies when the sharp edge is inside a block. If your black borders begin exactly at multiple-of-16 pixel boundaries, this is not a problem. However, the black borders on DVDs rarely come nicely aligned, so in practice you will always need to crop to avoid this penalty. In addition to frequency domain transforms, MPEG-type compression uses motion vectors to represent the change from one frame to the next. Motion vectors naturally work much less efficiently for new content coming in from the edges of the picture, because it is not present in the previous frame. As long as the picture extends all the way to the edge of the encoded region, motion vectors have no problem with content moving out the edges of the picture. However, in the presence of black borders, there can be trouble: For each macroblock, MPEG-type compression stores a vector identifying which part of the previous frame should be copied into this macroblock as a base for predicting the next frame. Only the remaining differences need to be encoded. If a macroblock spans the edge of the picture and contains part of the black border, then motion vectors from other parts of the picture will overwrite the black border. This means that lots of bits must be spent either re-blackening the border that was overwritten, or (more likely) a motion vector will not be used at all and all the changes in this macroblock will have to be coded explicitly. Either way, encoding efficiency is greatly reduced. Again, this problem only applies if black borders do not line up on multiple-of-16 boundaries. Finally, suppose we have a macroblock in the interior of the picture, and an object is moving into this block from near the edge of the image. MPEG-type coding cannot say "copy the part that is inside the picture but not the black border." So the black border will get copied inside too, and lots of bits will have to be spent encoding the part of the picture that is supposed to be there. If the picture runs all the way to the edge of the encoded area, MPEG has special optimizations to repeatedly copy the pixels at the edge of the picture when a motion vector comes from outside the encoded area. This feature becomes useless when the movie has black borders. Unlike problems 1 and 2, aligning the borders at multiples of 16 does not help here. Despite the borders being entirely black and never changing, there is at least a minimal amount of overhead involved in having more macroblocks. For all of these reasons, it is recommended to fully crop black borders. Further, if there is an area of noise/distortion at the edge of the picture, cropping this will improve encoding efficiency as well. Videophile purists who want to preserve the original as close as possible may object to this cropping, but unless you plan to encode at constant quantizer, the quality you gain from cropping will considerably exceed the amount of information lost at the edges. Recall from the previous section that the final picture size you encode should be a multiple of 16 (in both width and height). This can be achieved by cropping, scaling, or a combination of both. When cropping, there are a few guidelines that must be followed to avoid damaging your movie. The normal YUV format, 4:2:0, stores chroma (color) information subsampled, i.e. chroma is only sampled half as often in each direction as luma (intensity) information. Observe this diagram, where L indicates luma sampling points and C chroma. L L L L L L L L C C C C L L L L L L L L L L L L L L L L C C C C L L L L L L L L As you can see, rows and columns of the image naturally come in pairs. Thus your crop offsets and dimensions must be even numbers. If they are not, the chroma will no longer line up correctly with the luma. In theory, it is possible to crop with odd offsets, but it requires resampling the chroma which is potentially a lossy operation and not supported by the crop filter. Further, interlaced video is sampled as follows: Top field Bottom field L L L L L L L L C C C C L L L L L L L L L L L L L L L L C C C C L L L L L L L L L L L L L L L L C C C C L L L L L L L L L L L L L L L L C C C C L L L L L L L L As you can see, the pattern does not repeat until after 4 lines. So for interlaced video, your y-offset and height for cropping must be multiples of 4. Native DVD resolution is 720x480 for NTSC, and 720x576 for PAL, but there is an aspect flag that specifies whether it is full-screen (4:3) or wide-screen (16:9). Many (if not most) widescreen DVDs are not strictly 16:9, and will be either 1.85:1 or 2.35:1 (cinescope). This means that there will be black bands in the video that will need to be cropped out. MPlayer provides a crop detection filter that will determine the crop rectangle (-vf cropdetect). Run MPlayer with -vf cropdetect and it will print out the crop settings to remove the borders. You should let the movie run long enough that the whole picture area is used, in order to get accurate crop values. Then, test the values you get with MPlayer, using the command line which was printed by cropdetect, and adjust the rectangle as needed. The rectangle filter can help by allowing you to interactively position the crop rectangle over your movie. Remember to follow the above divisibility guidelines so that you do not misalign the chroma planes. In certain cases, scaling may be undesirable. Scaling in the vertical direction is difficult with interlaced video, and if you wish to preserve the interlacing, you should usually refrain from scaling. If you will not be scaling but you still want to use multiple-of-16 dimensions, you will have to overcrop. Do not undercrop, since black borders are very bad for encoding! Because MPEG-4 uses 16x16 macroblocks, you will want to make sure that each dimension of the video you are encoding is a multiple of 16 or else you will be degrading quality, especially at lower bitrates. You can do this by rounding the width and height of the crop rectangle down to the nearest multiple of 16. As stated earlier, when cropping, you will want to increase the Y offset by half the difference of the old and the new height so that the resulting video is taken from the center of the frame. And because of the way DVD video is sampled, make sure the offset is an even number. (In fact, as a rule, never use odd values for any parameter when you are cropping and scaling video.) If you are not comfortable throwing a few extra pixels away, you might prefer to scale the video instead. We will look at this in our example below. You can actually let the cropdetect filter do all of the above for you, as it has an optional round parameter that is equal to 16 by default. Also, be careful about "half black" pixels at the edges. Make sure you crop these out too, or else you will be wasting bits there that are better spent elsewhere. After all is said and done, you will probably end up with video whose pixels are not quite 1.85:1 or 2.35:1, but rather something close to that. You could calculate the new aspect ratio manually, but MEncoder offers an option for libavcodec called autoaspect that will do this for you. Absolutely do not scale this video up in order to square the pixels unless you like to waste your hard disk space. Scaling should be done on playback, and the player will use the aspect stored in the AVI to determine the correct resolution. Unfortunately, not all players enforce this auto-scaling information, therefore you may still want to rescale. If you will not be encoding in constant quantizer mode, you need to select a bitrate. The concept of bitrate is quite simple. It is the (average) number of bits that will be consumed to store your movie, per second. Normally bitrate is measured in kilobits (1000 bits) per second. The size of your movie on disk is the bitrate times the length of the movie in time, plus a small amount of "overhead" (see the section on the AVI container for instance). Other parameters such as scaling, cropping, etc. will not alter the file size unless you change the bitrate as well! Bitrate does not scale proportionally to resolution. That is to say, a 320x240 file at 200 kbit/sec will not be the same quality as the same movie at 640x480 and 800 kbit/sec! There are two reasons for this: Perceptual: You notice MPEG artifacts more if they are scaled up bigger! Artifacts appear on the scale of blocks (8x8). Your eye will not see errors in 4800 small blocks as easily as it sees errors in 1200 large blocks (assuming you will be scaling both to fullscreen). Theoretical: When you scale down an image but still use the same size (8x8) blocks for the frequency space transform, you move more data to the high frequency bands. Roughly speaking, each pixel contains more of the detail than it did before. So even though your scaled-down picture contains 1/4 the information in the spacial directions, it could still contain a large portion of the information in the frequency domain (assuming that the high frequencies were underutilized in the original 640x480 image). Past guides have recommended choosing a bitrate and resolution based on a "bits per pixel" approach, but this is usually not valid due to the above reasons. A better estimate seems to be that bitrates scale proportional to the square root of resolution, so that 320x240 and 400 kbit/sec would be comparable to 640x480 at 800 kbit/sec. However this has not been verified with theoretical or empirical rigor. Further, given that movies vary greatly with regard to noise, detail, degree of motion, etc., it is futile to make general recommendations for bits per length-of-diagonal (the analog of bits per pixel, using the square root). So far we have discussed the difficulty of choosing a bitrate and resolution. The following steps will guide you in computing the resolution of your encode without distorting the video too much, by taking into account several types of information about the source video. First, you should compute the encoded aspect ratio: ARc = (Wc x (ARa / PRdvd )) / Hc Wc and Hc are the width and height of the cropped video, ARa is the displayed aspect ratio, which usually is 4/3 or 16/9, PRdvd is the pixel ratio of the DVD which is equal to 1.25=(720/576) for PAL DVDs and 1.5=(720/480) for NTSC DVDs. Then, you can compute the X and Y resolution, according to a certain Compression Quality (CQ) factor: ResY = INT(SQRT( 1000*Bitrate/25/ARc/CQ )/16) * 16 and ResX = INT( ResY * ARc / 16) * 16 Okay, but what is the CQ? The CQ represents the number of bits per pixel and per frame of the encode. Roughly speaking, the greater the CQ, the less the likelihood to see encoding artifacts. However, if you have a target size for your movie (1 or 2 CDs for instance), there is a limited total number of bits that you can spend; therefore it is necessary to find a good tradeoff between compressibility and quality. The CQ depends on the bitrate, the video codec efficiency and the movie resolution. In order to raise the CQ, typically you would downscale the movie given that the bitrate is computed in function of the target size and the length of the movie, which are constant. With MPEG-4 ASP codecs such as Xvid and libavcodec, a CQ below 0.18 usually results in a pretty blocky picture, because there are not enough bits to code the information of each macroblock. (MPEG4, like many other codecs, groups pixels by blocks of several pixels to compress the image; if there are not enough bits, the edges of those blocks are visible.) It is therefore wise to take a CQ ranging from 0.20 to 0.22 for a 1 CD rip, and 0.26-0.28 for 2 CDs rip with standard encoding options. More advanced encoding options such as those listed here for libavcodec and Xvid should make it possible to get the same quality with CQ ranging from 0.18 to 0.20 for a 1 CD rip, and 0.24 to 0.26 for a 2 CD rip. With MPEG-4 AVC codecs such as x264, you can use a CQ ranging from 0.14 to 0.16 with standard encoding options, and should be able to go as low as 0.10 to 0.12 with x264's advanced encoding settings. Please take note that the CQ is just an indicative figure, as depending on the encoded content, a CQ of 0.18 may look just fine for a Bergman, contrary to a movie such as The Matrix, which contains many high-motion scenes. On the other hand, it is worthless to raise CQ higher than 0.30 as you would be wasting bits without any noticeable quality gain. Also note that as mentioned earlier in this guide, low resolution videos need a bigger CQ (compared to, for instance, DVD resolution) to look good. Learning how to use MEncoder's video filters is essential to producing good encodes. All video processing is performed through the filters -- cropping, scaling, color adjustment, noise removal, sharpening, deinterlacing, telecine, inverse telecine, and deblocking, just to name a few. Along with the vast number of supported input formats, the variety of filters available in MEncoder is one of its main advantages over other similar programs. Filters are loaded in a chain using the -vf option: -vf filter1=options,filter2=options,... Most filters take several numeric options separated by colons, but the syntax for options varies from filter to filter, so read the man page for details on the filters you wish to use. Filters operate on the video in the order they are loaded. For example, the following chain: -vf crop=688:464:12:4,scale=640:464 will first crop the 688x464 region of the picture with upper-left corner at (12,4), and then scale the result down to 640x464. Certain filters need to be loaded at or near the beginning of the filter chain, in order to take advantage of information from the video decoder that will be lost or invalidated by other filters. The principal examples are pp (postprocessing, only when it is performing deblock or dering operations), spp (another postprocessor to remove MPEG artifacts), pullup (inverse telecine), and softpulldown (for converting soft telecine to hard telecine). In general, you want to do as little filtering as possible to the movie in order to remain close to the original DVD source. Cropping is often necessary (as described above), but avoid to scale the video. Although scaling down is sometimes preferred to using higher quantizers, we want to avoid both these things: remember that we decided from the start to trade bits for quality. Also, do not adjust gamma, contrast, brightness, etc. What looks good on your display may not look good on others. These adjustments should be done on playback only. One thing you might want to do, however, is pass the video through a very light denoise filter, such as -vf hqdn3d=2:1:2. Again, it is a matter of putting those bits to better use: why waste them encoding noise when you can just add that noise back in during playback? Increasing the parameters for hqdn3d will further improve compressibility, but if you increase the values too much, you risk degrading the image visibly. The suggested values above (2:1:2) are quite conservative; you should feel free to experiment with higher values and observe the results for yourself. Almost all movies are shot at 24 fps. Because NTSC is 30000/1001 fps, some processing must be done to this 24 fps video to make it run at the correct NTSC framerate. The process is called 3:2 pulldown, commonly referred to as telecine (because pulldown is often applied during the telecine process), and, naively described, it works by slowing the film down to 24000/1001 fps, and repeating every fourth frame. No special processing, however, is done to the video for PAL DVDs, which run at 25 fps. (Technically, PAL can be telecined, called 2:2 pulldown, but this does not become an issue in practice.) The 24 fps film is simply played back at 25 fps. The result is that the movie runs slightly faster, but unless you are an alien, you probably will not notice the difference. Most PAL DVDs have pitch-corrected audio, so when they are played back at 25 fps things will sound right, even though the audio track (and hence the whole movie) has a running time that is 4% less than NTSC DVDs. Because the video in a PAL DVD has not been altered, you need not worry much about framerate. The source is 25 fps, and your rip will be 25 fps. However, if you are ripping an NTSC DVD movie, you may need to apply inverse telecine. For movies shot at 24 fps, the video on the NTSC DVD is either telecined 30000/1001, or else it is progressive 24000/1001 fps and intended to be telecined on-the-fly by a DVD player. On the other hand, TV series are usually only interlaced, not telecined. This is not a hard rule: some TV series are interlaced (such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer) whereas some are a mixture of progressive and interlaced (such as Angel, or 24). It is highly recommended that you read the section on How to deal with telecine and interlacing in NTSC DVDs to learn how to handle the different possibilities. However, if you are mostly just ripping movies, likely you are either dealing with 24 fps progressive or telecined video, in which case you can use the pullup filter -vf pullup,softskip. If the movie you want to encode is interlaced (NTSC video or PAL video), you will need to choose whether you want to deinterlace or not. While deinterlacing will make your movie usable on progressive scan displays such a computer monitors and projectors, it comes at a cost: The fieldrate of 50 or 60000/1001 fields per second is halved to 25 or 30000/1001 frames per second, and roughly half of the information in your movie will be lost during scenes with significant motion. Therefore, if you are encoding for high quality archival purposes, it is recommended not to deinterlace. You can always deinterlace the movie at playback time when displaying it on progressive scan devices. The power of currently available computers forces players to use a deinterlacing filter, which results in a slight degradation in image quality. But future players will be able to mimic the interlaced display of a TV, deinterlacing to full fieldrate and interpolating 50 or 60000/1001 entire frames per second from the interlaced video. Special care must be taken when working with interlaced video: Crop height and y-offset must be multiples of 4. Any vertical scaling must be performed in interlaced mode. Postprocessing and denoising filters may not work as expected unless you take special care to operate them a field at a time, and they may damage the video if used incorrectly. With these things in mind, here is our first example: mencoder capture.avi -mc 0 -oac lavc -ovc lavc -lavcopts \ vcodec=mpeg2video:vbitrate=6000:ilme:ildct:acodec=mp2:abitrate=224 Note the ilme and ildct options. MEncoder's audio/video synchronization algorithms were designed with the intention of recovering files with broken sync. However, in some cases they can cause unnecessary skipping and duplication of frames, and possibly slight A/V desync, when used with proper input (of course, A/V sync issues apply only if you process or copy the audio track while transcoding the video, which is strongly encouraged). Therefore, you may have to switch to basic A/V sync with the -mc 0 option, or put this in your ~/.mplayer/mencoder config file, as long as you are only working with good sources (DVD, TV capture, high quality MPEG-4 rips, etc) and not broken ASF/RM/MOV files. If you want to further guard against strange frame skips and duplication, you can use both -mc 0 and -noskip. This will prevent all A/V sync, and copy frames one-to-one, so you cannot use it if you will be using any filters that unpredictably add or drop frames, or if your input file has variable framerate! Therefore, using -noskip is not in general recommended. The so-called "three-pass" audio encoding which MEncoder supports has been reported to cause A/V desync. This will definitely happen if it is used in conjunction with certain filters, therefore, it is now recommended not to use three-pass audio mode. This feature is only left for compatibility purposes and for expert users who understand when it is safe to use and when it is not. If you have never heard of three-pass mode before, forget that we even mentioned it! There have also been reports of A/V desync when encoding from stdin with MEncoder. Do not do this! Always use a file or CD/DVD/etc device as input. Which video codec is best to choose depends on several factors, like size, quality, streamability, usability and popularity, some of which widely depend on personal taste and technical constraints. Compression efficiency: It is quite easy to understand that most newer-generation codecs are made to increase quality and compression. Therefore, the authors of this guide and many other people suggest that you cannot go wrong Be careful, however: Decoding DVD-resolution MPEG-4 AVC videos requires a fast machine (i.e. a Pentium 4 over 1.5GHz or a Pentium M over 1GHz). when choosing MPEG-4 AVC codecs like x264 instead of MPEG-4 ASP codecs such as libavcodec MPEG-4 or Xvid. (Advanced codec developers may be interested in reading Michael Niedermayer's opinion on "why MPEG4-ASP sucks".) Likewise, you should get better quality using MPEG-4 ASP than you would with MPEG-2 codecs. However, newer codecs which are in heavy development can suffer from bugs which have not yet been noticed and which can ruin an encode. This is simply the tradeoff for using bleeding-edge technology. What is more, beginning to use a new codec requires that you spend some time becoming familiar with its options, so that you know what to adjust to achieve a desired picture quality. Hardware compatibility: It usually takes a long time for standalone video players to begin to include support for the latest video codecs. As a result, most only support MPEG-1 (like VCD, XVCD and KVCD), MPEG-2 (like DVD, SVCD and KVCD) and MPEG-4 ASP (like DivX, libavcodec's LMP4 and Xvid) (Beware: Usually, not all MPEG-4 ASP features are supported). Please refer to the technical specs of your player (if they are available), or google around for more information. Best quality per encoding time: Codecs that have been around for some time (such as libavcodec MPEG-4 and Xvid) are usually heavily optimized with all kinds of smart algorithms and SIMD assembly code. That is why they tend to yield the best quality per encoding time ratio. However, they may have some very advanced options that, if enabled, will make the encode really slow for marginal gains. If you are after blazing speed you should stick around the default settings of the video codec (although you should still try the other options which are mentioned in other sections of this guide). You may also consider choosing a codec which can do multi-threaded processing, though this is only useful for users of machines with several CPUs. libavcodec MPEG-4 does allow that, but speed gains are limited, and there is a slight negative effect on picture quality. Xvid's multi-threaded encoding, activated by the threads option, can be used to boost encoding speed — by about 40-60% in typical cases — with little if any picture degradation. x264 also allows multi-threaded encoding, which currently speeds up encoding by 94% per CPU core while lowering PSNR between 0.005dB and 0.01dB on a typical setup. Personal taste: This is where it gets almost irrational: For the same reason that some hung on to DivX 3 for years when newer codecs were already doing wonders, some folks will prefer Xvid or libavcodec MPEG-4 over x264. You should make your own judgement; do not take advice from people who swear by one codec. Take a few sample clips from raw sources and compare different encoding options and codecs to find one that suits you best. The best codec is the one you master, and the one that looks best to your eyes on your display The same encode may not look the same on someone else's monitor or when played back by a different decoder, so future-proof your encodes by playing them back on different setups. ! Please refer to the section selecting codecs and container formats to get a list of supported codecs. Audio is a much simpler problem to solve: if you care about quality, just leave it as is. Even AC-3 5.1 streams are at most 448Kbit/s, and they are worth every bit. You might be tempted to transcode the audio to high quality Vorbis, but just because you do not have an A/V receiver for AC-3 pass-through today does not mean you will not have one tomorrow. Future-proof your DVD rips by preserving the AC-3 stream. You can keep the AC-3 stream either by copying it directly into the video stream during the encoding. You can also extract the AC-3 stream in order to mux it into containers such as NUT or Matroska. mplayer source_file.vob -aid 129 -dumpaudio -dumpfile sound.ac3 will dump into the file sound.ac3 the audio track number 129 from the file source_file.vob (NB: DVD VOB files usually use a different audio numbering, which means that the VOB audio track 129 is the 2nd audio track of the file). But sometimes you truly have no choice but to further compress the sound so that more bits can be spent on the video. Most people choose to compress audio with either MP3 or Vorbis audio codecs. While the latter is a very space-efficient codec, MP3 is better supported by hardware players, although this trend is changing. Do not use -nosound when encoding a file with audio, even if you will be encoding and muxing audio separately later. Though it may work in ideal cases, using -nosound is likely to hide some problems in your encoding command line setting. In other words, having a soundtrack during your encode assures you that, provided you do not see messages such as Too many audio packets in the buffer, you will be able to get proper sync. You need to have MEncoder process the sound. You can for example copy the original soundtrack during the encode with -oac copy or convert it to a "light" 4 kHz mono WAV PCM with -oac pcm -channels 1 -srate 4000. Otherwise, in some cases, it will generate a video file that will not sync with the audio. Such cases are when the number of video frames in the source file does not match up to the total length of audio frames or whenever there are discontinuities/splices where there are missing or extra audio frames. The correct way to handle this kind of problem is to insert silence or cut audio at these points. However MPlayer cannot do that, so if you demux the AC-3 audio and encode it with a separate app (or dump it to PCM with MPlayer), the splices will be left incorrect and the only way to correct them is to drop/duplicate video frames at the splice. As long as MEncoder sees the audio when it is encoding the video, it can do this dropping/duping (which is usually OK since it takes place at full black/scene change), but if MEncoder cannot see the audio, it will just process all frames as-is and they will not fit the final audio stream when you for example merge your audio and video track into a Matroska file. First of all, you will have to convert the DVD sound into a WAV file that the audio codec can use as input. For example: mplayer source_file.vob -ao pcm:file=destination_sound.wav \ -vc dummy -aid 1 -vo null will dump the second audio track from the file source_file.vob into the file destination_sound.wav. You may want to normalize the sound before encoding, as DVD audio tracks are commonly recorded at low volumes. You can use the tool normalize for instance, which is available in most distributions. If you are using Windows, a tool such as BeSweet can do the same job. You will compress in either Vorbis or MP3. For example: oggenc -q1 destination_sound.wav will encode destination_sound.wav with the encoding quality 1, which is roughly equivalent to 80Kb/s, and is the minimum quality at which you should encode if you care about quality. Please note that MEncoder currently cannot mux Vorbis audio tracks into the output file because it only supports AVI and MPEG containers as an output, each of which may lead to audio/video playback synchronization problems with some players when the AVI file contain VBR audio streams such as Vorbis. Do not worry, this document will show you how you can do that with third party programs. Now that you have encoded your video, you will most likely want to mux it with one or more audio tracks into a movie container, such as AVI, MPEG, Matroska or NUT. MEncoder is currently only able to natively output audio and video into MPEG and AVI container formats. for example: mencoder -oac copy -ovc copy -o output_movie.avi \ -audiofile input_audio.mp2 input_video.avi This would merge the video file input_video.avi and the audio file input_audio.mp2 into the AVI file output_movie.avi. This command works with MPEG-1 layer I, II and III (more commonly known as MP3) audio, WAV and a few other audio formats too. MEncoder features experimental support for libavformat, which is a library from the FFmpeg project that supports muxing and demuxing a variety of containers. For example: mencoder -oac copy -ovc copy -o output_movie.asf -audiofile input_audio.mp2 \ input_video.avi -of lavf -lavfopts format=asf This will do the same thing as the previous example, except that the output container will be ASF. Please note that this support is highly experimental (but getting better every day), and will only work if you compiled MPlayer with the support for libavformat enabled (which means that a pre-packaged binary version will not work in most cases). You may experience some serious A/V sync problems while trying to mux your video and some audio tracks, where no matter how you adjust the audio delay, you will never get proper sync. That may happen when you use some video filters that will drop or duplicate some frames, like the inverse telecine filters. It is strongly encouraged to append the harddup video filter at the end of the filter chain to avoid this kind of problem. Without harddup, if MEncoder wants to duplicate a frame, it relies on the muxer to put a mark on the container so that the last frame will be displayed again to maintain sync while writing no actual frame. With harddup, MEncoder will instead just push the last frame displayed again into the filter chain. This means that the encoder receives the exact same frame twice, and compresses it. This will result in a slightly bigger file, but will not cause problems when demuxing or remuxing into other container formats. You may also have no choice but to use harddup with container formats that are not too tightly linked with MEncoder such as the ones supported through libavformat, which may not support frame duplication at the container level. Although it is the most widely-supported container format after MPEG-1, AVI also has some major drawbacks. Perhaps the most obvious is the overhead. For each chunk of the AVI file, 24 bytes are wasted on headers and index. This translates into a little over 5 MB per hour, or 1-2.5% overhead for a 700 MB movie. This may not seem like much, but it could mean the difference between being able to use 700 kbit/sec video or 714 kbit/sec, and every bit of quality counts. In addition this gross inefficiency, AVI also has the following major limitations: Only fixed-fps content can be stored. This is particularly limiting if the original material you want to encode is mixed content, for example a mix of NTSC video and film material. Actually there are hacks that can be used to store mixed-framerate content in AVI, but they increase the (already huge) overhead fivefold or more and so are not practical. Audio in AVI files must be either constant-bitrate (CBR) or constant-framesize (i.e. all frames decode to the same number of samples). Unfortunately, the most efficient codec, Vorbis, does not meet either of these requirements. Therefore, if you plan to store your movie in AVI, you will have to use a less efficient codec such as MP3 or AC-3. Having said all that, MEncoder does not currently support variable-fps output or Vorbis encoding. Therefore, you may not see these as limitations if MEncoder is the only tool you will be using to produce your encodes. However, it is possible to use MEncoder only for video encoding, and then use external tools to encode audio and mux it into another container format. Matroska is a free, open standard container format, aiming to offer a lot of advanced features, which older containers like AVI cannot handle. For example, Matroska supports variable bitrate audio content (VBR), variable framerates (VFR), chapters, file attachments, error detection code (EDC) and modern A/V Codecs like "Advanced Audio Coding" (AAC), "Vorbis" or "MPEG-4 AVC" (H.264), next to nothing handled by AVI. The tools required to create Matroska files are collectively called mkvtoolnix, and are available for most Unix platforms as well as Windows. Because Matroska is an open standard you may find other tools that suit you better, but since mkvtoolnix is the most common, and is supported by the Matroska team itself, we will only cover its usage. Probably the easiest way to get started with Matroska is to use MMG, the graphical frontend shipped with mkvtoolnix, and follow the guide to mkvmerge GUI (mmg) You may also mux audio and video files using the command line: mkvmerge -o output.mkv input_video.avi input_audio1.mp3 input_audio2.ac3 This would merge the video file input_video.avi and the two audio files input_audio1.mp3 and input_audio2.ac3 into the Matroska file output.mkv. Matroska, as mentioned earlier, is able to do much more than that, like multiple audio tracks (including fine-tuning of audio/video synchronization), chapters, subtitles, splitting, etc... Please refer to the documentation of those applications for more details. If you do not understand much of what is written in this document, read the Wikipedia entry on telecine. It is an understandable and reasonably comprehensive description of what telecine is. Many documents, including the article linked above, refer to the fields per second value of NTSC video as 59.94 and the corresponding frames per second values as 29.97 (for telecined and interlaced) and 23.976 (for progressive). For simplicity, some documents even round these numbers to 60, 30, and 24. Strictly speaking, all those numbers are approximations. Black and white NTSC video was exactly 60 fields per second, but 60000/1001 was later chosen to accommodate color data while remaining compatible with contemporary black and white televisions. Digital NTSC video (such as on a DVD) is also 60000/1001 fields per second. From this, interlaced and telecined video are derived to be 30000/1001 frames per second; progressive video is 24000/1001 frames per second. Older versions of the MEncoder documentation and many archived mailing list posts refer to 59.94, 29.97, and 23.976. All MEncoder documentation has been updated to use the fractional values, and you should use them too. -ofps 23.976 is incorrect. -ofps 24000/1001 should be used instead. All video intended to be displayed on an NTSC television set must be 60000/1001 fields per second. Made-for-TV movies and shows are often filmed directly at 60000/1001 fields per second, but the majority of cinema is filmed at 24 or 24000/1001 frames per second. When cinematic movie DVDs are mastered, the video is then converted for television using a process called telecine. On a DVD, the video is never actually stored as 60000/1001 fields per second. For video that was originally 60000/1001, each pair of fields is combined to form a frame, resulting in 30000/1001 frames per second. Hardware DVD players then read a flag embedded in the video stream to determine whether the odd- or even-numbered lines should form the first field. Usually, 24000/1001 frames per second content stays as it is when encoded for a DVD, and the DVD player must perform telecining on-the-fly. Sometimes, however, the video is telecined before being stored on the DVD; even though it was originally 24000/1001 frames per second, it becomes 60000/1001 fields per second. When it is stored on the DVD, pairs of fields are combined to form 30000/1001 frames per second. When looking at individual frames formed from 60000/1001 fields per second video, telecined or otherwise, interlacing is clearly visible wherever there is any motion, because one field (say, the even-numbered lines) represents a moment in time 1/(60000/1001) seconds later than the other. Playing interlaced video on a computer looks ugly both because the monitor is higher resolution and because the video is shown frame-after-frame instead of field-after-field. This section only applies to NTSC DVDs, and not PAL. The example MEncoder lines throughout the document are not intended for actual use. They are simply the bare minimum required to encode the pertaining video category. How to make good DVD rips or fine-tune libavcodec for maximal quality is not within the scope of this section; refer to other sections within the MEncoder encoding guide. There are a couple footnotes specific to this guide, linked like this: [1] Progressive video was originally filmed at 24000/1001 fps, and stored on the DVD without alteration. When you play a progressive DVD in MPlayer, MPlayer will print the following line as soon as the movie begins to play: demux_mpg: 24000/1001 fps progressive NTSC content detected, switching framerate. From this point forward, demux_mpg should never say it finds "30000/1001 fps NTSC content." When you watch progressive video, you should never see any interlacing. Beware, however, because sometimes there is a tiny bit of telecine mixed in where you would not expect. I have encountered TV show DVDs that have one second of telecine at every scene change, or at seemingly random places. I once watched a DVD that had a progressive first half, and the second half was telecined. If you want to be really thorough, you can scan the entire movie: mplayer dvd://1 -nosound -vo null -benchmark Using -benchmark makes MPlayer play the movie as quickly as it possibly can; still, depending on your hardware, it can take a while. Every time demux_mpg reports a framerate change, the line immediately above will show you the time at which the change occurred. Sometimes progressive video on DVDs is referred to as "soft-telecine" because it is intended to be telecined by the DVD player. Telecined video was originally filmed at 24000/1001, but was telecined before it was written to the DVD. MPlayer does not (ever) report any framerate changes when it plays telecined video. Watching a telecined video, you will see interlacing artifacts that seem to "blink": they repeatedly appear and disappear. You can look closely at this by mplayer dvd://1 Seek to a part with motion. Use the . key to step forward one frame at a time. Look at the pattern of interlaced-looking and progressive-looking frames. If the pattern you see is PPPII,PPPII,PPPII,... then the video is telecined. If you see some other pattern, then the video may have been telecined using some non-standard method; MEncoder cannot losslessly convert non-standard telecine to progressive. If you do not see any pattern at all, then it is most likely interlaced. Sometimes telecined video on DVDs is referred to as "hard-telecine". Since hard-telecine is already 60000/1001 fields per second, the DVD player plays the video without any manipulation. Another way to tell if your source is telecined or not is to play the source with the -vf pullup and -v command line options to see how pullup matches frames. If the source is telecined, you should see on the console a 3:2 pattern with 0+.1.+2 and 0++1 alternating. This technique has the advantage that you do not need to watch the source to identify it, which could be useful if you wish to automate the encoding procedure, or to carry out said procedure remotely via a slow connection. Interlaced video was originally filmed at 60000/1001 fields per second, and stored on the DVD as 30000/1001 frames per second. The interlacing effect (often called "combing") is a result of combining pairs of fields into frames. Each field is supposed to be 1/(60000/1001) seconds apart, and when they are displayed simultaneously the difference is apparent. As with telecined video, MPlayer should not ever report any framerate changes when playing interlaced content. When you view an interlaced video closely by frame-stepping with the . key, you will see that every single frame is interlaced. All of a "mixed progressive and telecine" video was originally 24000/1001 frames per second, but some parts of it ended up being telecined. When MPlayer plays this category, it will (often repeatedly) switch back and forth between "30000/1001 fps NTSC" and "24000/1001 fps progressive NTSC". Watch the bottom of MPlayer's output to see these messages. You should check the "30000/1001 fps NTSC" sections to make sure they are actually telecine, and not just interlaced. In "mixed progressive and interlaced" content, progressive and interlaced video have been spliced together. This category looks just like "mixed progressive and telecine", until you examine the 30000/1001 fps sections and see that they do not have the telecine pattern. As I mentioned in the beginning, example MEncoder lines below are not meant to actually be used; they only demonstrate the minimum parameters to properly encode each category. Progressive video requires no special filtering to encode. The only parameter you need to be sure to use is -ofps 24000/1001. Otherwise, MEncoder will try to encode at 30000/1001 fps and will duplicate frames. mencoder dvd://1 -oac copy -ovc lavc -ofps 24000/1001 It is often the case, however, that a video that looks progressive actually has very short parts of telecine mixed in. Unless you are sure, it is safest to treat the video as mixed progressive and telecine. The performance loss is small [3]. Telecine can be reversed to retrieve the original 24000/1001 content, using a process called inverse-telecine. MPlayer contains several filters to accomplish this; the best filter, pullup, is described in the mixed progressive and telecine section. For most practical cases it is not possible to retrieve a complete progressive video from interlaced content. The only way to do so without losing half of the vertical resolution is to double the framerate and try to "guess" what ought to make up the corresponding lines for each field (this has drawbacks - see method 3). Encode the video in interlaced form. Normally, interlacing wreaks havoc with the encoder's ability to compress well, but libavcodec has two parameters specifically for dealing with storing interlaced video a bit better: ildct and ilme. Also, using mbd=2 is strongly recommended [2] because it will encode macroblocks as non-interlaced in places where there is no motion. Note that -ofps is NOT needed here. mencoder dvd://1 -oac copy -ovc lavc -lavcopts ildct:ilme:mbd=2 Use a deinterlacing filter before encoding. There are several of these filters available to choose from, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. Consult mplayer -pphelp and mplayer -vf help to see what is available (grep for "deint"), read Michael Niedermayer's Deinterlacing filters comparison, and search the MPlayer mailing lists to find many discussions about the various filters. Again, the framerate is not changing, so no -ofps. Also, deinterlacing should be done after cropping [1] and before scaling. mencoder dvd://1 -oac copy -vf yadif -ovc lavc Unfortunately, this option is buggy with MEncoder; it ought to work well with MEncoder G2, but that is not here yet. You might experience crashes. Anyway, the purpose of -vf tfields is to create a full frame out of each field, which makes the framerate 60000/1001. The advantage of this approach is that no data is ever lost; however, since each frame comes from only one field, the missing lines have to be interpolated somehow. There are no very good methods of generating the missing data, and so the result will look a bit similar to when using some deinterlacing filters. Generating the missing lines creates other issues, as well, simply because the amount of data doubles. So, higher encoding bitrates are required to maintain quality, and more CPU power is used for both encoding and decoding. tfields has several different options for how to create the missing lines of each frame. If you use this method, then Reference the manual, and chose whichever option looks best for your material. Note that when using tfields you have to specify both -fps and -ofps to be twice the framerate of your original source. mencoder dvd://1 -oac copy -vf tfields=2 -ovc lavc \ -fps 60000/1001 -ofps 60000/1001 If you plan on downscaling dramatically, you can extract and encode only one of the two fields. Of course, you will lose half the vertical resolution, but if you plan on downscaling to at most 1/2 of the original, the loss will not matter much. The result will be a progressive 30000/1001 frames per second file. The procedure is to use -vf field, then crop [1] and scale appropriately. Remember that you will have to adjust the scale to compensate for the vertical resolution being halved. mencoder dvd://1 -oac copy -vf field=0 -ovc lavc In order to turn mixed progressive and telecine video into entirely progressive video, the telecined parts have to be inverse-telecined. There are three ways to accomplish this, described below. Note that you should always inverse-telecine before any rescaling; unless you really know what you are doing, inverse-telecine before cropping, too [1]. -ofps 24000/1001 is needed here because the output video will be 24000/1001 frames per second. -vf pullup is designed to inverse-telecine telecined material while leaving progressive data alone. In order to work properly, pullup must be followed by the softskip filter or else MEncoder will crash. pullup is, however, the cleanest and most accurate method available for encoding both telecine and "mixed progressive and telecine". mencoder dvd://1 -oac copy -vf pullup,softskip -ovc lavc -ofps 24000/1001 -vf filmdint is similar to -vf pullup: both filters attempt to match a pair of fields to form a complete frame. filmdint will deinterlace individual fields that it cannot match, however, whereas pullup will simply drop them. Also, the two filters have separate detection code, and filmdint may tend to match fields a bit less often. Which filter works better may depend on the input video and personal taste; feel free to experiment with fine-tuning the filters' options if you encounter problems with either one (see the man page for details). For most well-mastered input video, however, both filters work quite well, so either one is a safe choice to start with. mencoder dvd://1 -oac copy -vf filmdint -ovc lavc -ofps 24000/1001 An older method is to, rather than inverse-telecine the telecined parts, telecine the non-telecined parts and then inverse-telecine the whole video. Sound confusing? softpulldown is a filter that goes through a video and makes the entire file telecined. If we follow softpulldown with either detc or ivtc, the final result will be entirely progressive. -ofps 24000/1001 is needed. mencoder dvd://1 -oac copy -vf softpulldown,ivtc=1 -ovc lavc -ofps 24000/1001 There are two options for dealing with this category, each of which is a compromise. You should decide based on the duration/location of each type. Treat it as progressive. The interlaced parts will look interlaced, and some of the interlaced fields will have to be dropped, resulting in a bit of uneven jumpiness. You can use a postprocessing filter if you want to, but it may slightly degrade the progressive parts. This option should definitely not be used if you want to eventually display the video on an interlaced device (with a TV card, for example). If you have interlaced frames in a 24000/1001 frames per second video, they will be telecined along with the progressive frames. Half of the interlaced "frames" will be displayed for three fields' duration (3/(60000/1001) seconds), resulting in a flicking "jump back in time" effect that looks quite bad. If you even attempt this, you must use a deinterlacing filter like lb or l5. It may also be a bad idea for progressive display, too. It will drop pairs of consecutive interlaced fields, resulting in a discontinuity that can be more visible than with the second method, which shows some progressive frames twice. 30000/1001 frames per second interlaced video is already a bit choppy because it really should be shown at 60000/1001 fields per second, so the duplicate frames do not stand out as much. Either way, it is best to consider your content and how you intend to display it. If your video is 90% progressive and you never intend to show it on a TV, you should favor a progressive approach. If it is only half progressive, you probably want to encode it as if it is all interlaced. Treat it as interlaced. Some frames of the progressive parts will need to be duplicated, resulting in uneven jumpiness. Again, deinterlacing filters may slightly degrade the progressive parts. Video data on DVDs are stored in a format called YUV 4:2:0. In YUV video, luma ("brightness") and chroma ("color") are stored separately. Because the human eye is somewhat less sensitive to color than it is to brightness, in a YUV 4:2:0 picture there is only one chroma pixel for every four luma pixels. In a progressive picture, each square of four luma pixels (two on each side) has one common chroma pixel. You must crop progressive YUV 4:2:0 to even resolutions, and use even offsets. For example, crop=716:380:2:26 is OK but crop=716:380:3:26 is not. When you are dealing with interlaced YUV 4:2:0, the situation is a bit more complicated. Instead of every four luma pixels in the frame sharing a chroma pixel, every four luma pixels in each field share a chroma pixel. When fields are interlaced to form a frame, each scanline is one pixel high. Now, instead of all four luma pixels being in a square, there are two pixels side-by-side, and the other two pixels are side-by-side two scanlines down. The two luma pixels in the intermediate scanline are from the other field, and so share a different chroma pixel with two luma pixels two scanlines away. All this confusion makes it necessary to have vertical crop dimensions and offsets be multiples of four. Horizontal can stay even. For telecined video, I recommend that cropping take place after inverse telecining. Once the video is progressive you only need to crop by even numbers. If you really want to gain the slight speedup that cropping first may offer, you must crop vertically by multiples of four or else the inverse-telecine filter will not have proper data. For interlaced (not telecined) video, you must always crop vertically by multiples of four unless you use -vf field before cropping. Just because I recommend mbd=2 here does not mean it should not be used elsewhere. Along with trell, mbd=2 is one of the two libavcodec options that increases quality the most, and you should always use at least those two unless the drop in encoding speed is prohibitive (e.g. realtime encoding). There are many other options to libavcodec that increase encoding quality (and decrease encoding speed) but that is beyond the scope of this document. It is safe to use pullup (along with softskip ) on progressive video, and is usually a good idea unless the source has been definitively verified to be entirely progressive. The performance loss is small for most cases. On a bare-minimum encode, pullup causes MEncoder to be 50% slower. Adding sound processing and advanced lavcopts overshadows that difference, bringing the performance decrease of using pullup down to 2%. libavcodec provides simple encoding to a lot of interesting video and audio formats. You can encode to the following codecs (more or less up to date): Video codec nameDescription mjpeg Motion JPEG ljpeg lossless JPEG jpegls JPEG LS targa Targa image gif GIF image bmp BMP image png PNG image h261 H.261 h263 H.263 h263p H.263+ mpeg4 ISO standard MPEG-4 (DivX, Xvid compatible) msmpeg4 pre-standard MPEG-4 variant by MS, v3 (AKA DivX3) msmpeg4v2 pre-standard MPEG-4 by MS, v2 (used in old ASF files) wmv1 Windows Media Video, version 1 (AKA WMV7) wmv2 Windows Media Video, version 2 (AKA WMV8) rv10 RealVideo 1.0 rv20 RealVideo 2.0 mpeg1video MPEG-1 video mpeg2video MPEG-2 video huffyuv lossless compression ffvhuff FFmpeg modified huffyuv lossless asv1 ASUS Video v1 asv2 ASUS Video v2 ffv1 FFmpeg's lossless video codec svq1 Sorenson video 1 flv Sorenson H.263 used in Flash Video flashsv Flash Screen Video dvvideo Sony Digital Video snow FFmpeg's experimental wavelet-based codec zmbv Zip Motion Blocks Video dnxhd AVID DNxHD The first column contains the codec names that should be passed after the vcodec config, like: -lavcopts vcodec=msmpeg4 An example with MJPEG compression: mencoder dvd://2 -o title2.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mjpeg -oac copy Audio codec nameDescription ac3 Dolby Digital (AC-3) adpcm_* Adaptive PCM formats - see supplementary table flac Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) g726 G.726 ADPCM libamr_nb 3GPP Adaptive Multi-Rate (AMR) narrow-band libamr_wb 3GPP Adaptive Multi-Rate (AMR) wide-band libfaac Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) - using FAAC libgsm ETSI GSM 06.10 full rate libgsm_ms Microsoft GSM libmp3lame MPEG-1 audio layer 3 (MP3) - using LAME mp2 MPEG-1 audio layer 2 (MP2) pcm_* PCM formats - see supplementary table roq_dpcm Id Software RoQ DPCM sonic experimental FFmpeg lossy codec sonicls experimental FFmpeg lossless codec vorbis Vorbis wmav1 Windows Media Audio v1 wmav2 Windows Media Audio v2 The first column contains the codec names that should be passed after the acodec option, like: -lavcopts acodec=ac3 An example with AC-3 compression: mencoder dvd://2 -o title2.avi -oac lavc -lavcopts acodec=ac3 -ovc copy Contrary to libavcodec's video codecs, its audio codecs do not make a wise usage of the bits they are given as they lack some minimal psychoacoustic model (if at all) which most other codec implementations feature. However, note that all these audio codecs are very fast and work out-of-the-box everywhere MEncoder has been compiled with libavcodec (which is the case most of time), and do not depend on external libraries. PCM/ADPCM codec nameDescription pcm_s32le signed 32-bit little-endian pcm_s32be signed 32-bit big-endian pcm_u32le unsigned 32-bit little-endian pcm_u32be unsigned 32-bit big-endian pcm_s24le signed 24-bit little-endian pcm_s24be signed 24-bit big-endian pcm_u24le unsigned 24-bit little-endian pcm_u24be unsigned 24-bit big-endian pcm_s16le signed 16-bit little-endian pcm_s16be signed 16-bit big-endian pcm_u16le unsigned 16-bit little-endian pcm_u16be unsigned 16-bit big-endian pcm_s8 signed 8-bit pcm_u8 unsigned 8-bit pcm_alaw G.711 A-LAW pcm_mulaw G.711 μ-LAW pcm_s24daud signed 24-bit D-Cinema Audio format pcm_zork Activision Zork Nemesis adpcm_ima_qt Apple QuickTime adpcm_ima_wav Microsoft/IBM WAVE adpcm_ima_dk3 Duck DK3 adpcm_ima_dk4 Duck DK4 adpcm_ima_ws Westwood Studios adpcm_ima_smjpeg SDL Motion JPEG adpcm_ms Microsoft adpcm_4xm 4X Technologies adpcm_xa Phillips Yellow Book CD-ROM eXtended Architecture adpcm_ea Electronic Arts adpcm_ct Creative 16->4-bit adpcm_swf Adobe Shockwave Flash adpcm_yamaha Yamaha adpcm_sbpro_4 Creative VOC SoundBlaster Pro 8->4-bit adpcm_sbpro_3 Creative VOC SoundBlaster Pro 8->2.6-bit adpcm_sbpro_2 Creative VOC SoundBlaster Pro 8->2-bit adpcm_thp Nintendo GameCube FMV THP adpcm_adx Sega/CRI ADX Ideally, you would probably want to be able to just tell the encoder to switch into "high quality" mode and move on. That would probably be nice, but unfortunately hard to implement as different encoding options yield different quality results depending on the source material. That is because compression depends on the visual properties of the video in question. For example, Anime and live action have very different properties and thus require different options to obtain optimum encoding. The good news is that some options should never be left out, like mbd=2, trell, and v4mv. See below for a detailed description of common encoding options. vmax_b_frames: 1 or 2 is good, depending on the movie. Note that if you need to have your encode be decodable by DivX5, you need to activate closed GOP support, using libavcodec's cgop option, but you need to deactivate scene detection, which is not a good idea as it will hurt encode efficiency a bit. vb_strategy=1: helps in high-motion scenes. On some videos, vmax_b_frames may hurt quality, but vmax_b_frames=2 along with vb_strategy=1 helps. dia: motion search range. Bigger is better and slower. Negative values are a completely different scale. Good values are -1 for a fast encode, or 2-4 for slower. predia: motion search pre-pass. Not as important as dia. Good values are 1 (default) to 4. Requires preme=2 to really be useful. cmp, subcmp, precmp: Comparison function for motion estimation. Experiment with values of 0 (default), 2 (hadamard), 3 (dct), and 6 (rate distortion). 0 is fastest, and sufficient for precmp. For cmp and subcmp, 2 is good for Anime, and 3 is good for live action. 6 may or may not be slightly better, but is slow. last_pred: Number of motion predictors to take from the previous frame. 1-3 or so help at little speed cost. Higher values are slow for no extra gain. cbp, mv0: Controls the selection of macroblocks. Small speed cost for small quality gain. qprd: adaptive quantization based on the macroblock's complexity. May help or hurt depending on the video and other options. This can cause artifacts unless you set vqmax to some reasonably small value (6 is good, maybe as low as 4); vqmin=1 should also help. qns: very slow, especially when combined with qprd. This option will make the encoder minimize noise due to compression artifacts instead of making the encoded video strictly match the source. Do not use this unless you have already tweaked everything else as far as it will go and the results still are not good enough. vqcomp: Tweak ratecontrol. What values are good depends on the movie. You can safely leave this alone if you want. Reducing vqcomp puts more bits on low-complexity scenes, increasing it puts them on high-complexity scenes (default: 0.5, range: 0-1. recommended range: 0.5-0.7). vlelim, vcelim: Sets the single coefficient elimination threshold for luminance and chroma planes. These are encoded separately in all MPEG-like algorithms. The idea behind these options is to use some good heuristics to determine when the change in a block is less than the threshold you specify, and in such a case, to just encode the block as "no change". This saves bits and perhaps speeds up encoding. vlelim=-4 and vcelim=9 seem to be good for live movies, but seem not to help with Anime; when encoding animation, you should probably leave them unchanged. qpel: Quarter pixel motion estimation. MPEG-4 uses half pixel precision for its motion search by default, therefore this option comes with an overhead as more information will be stored in the encoded file. The compression gain/loss depends on the movie, but it is usually not very effective on Anime. qpel always incurs a significant cost in CPU decode time (+25% in practice). psnr: does not affect the actual encoding, but writes a log file giving the type/size/quality of each frame, and prints a summary of PSNR (Peak Signal to Noise Ratio) at the end. vme: The default is best. lumi_mask, dark_mask: Psychovisual adaptive quantization. You do not want to play with those options if you care about quality. Reasonable values may be effective in your case, but be warned this is very subjective. scplx_mask: Tries to prevent blocky artifacts, but postprocessing is better. The following settings are examples of different encoding option combinations that affect the speed vs quality tradeoff at the same target bitrate. All the encoding settings were tested on a 720x448 @30000/1001 fps video sample, the target bitrate was 900kbps, and the machine was an AMD-64 3400+ at 2400 MHz in 64 bits mode. Each encoding setting features the measured encoding speed (in frames per second) and the PSNR loss (in dB) compared to the "very high quality" setting. Please understand that depending on your source, your machine type and development advancements, you may get very different results. Description Encoding options speed (in fps) Relative PSNR loss (in dB) Very high quality vcodec=mpeg4:mbd=2:mv0:trell:v4mv:cbp:last_pred=3:predia=2:dia=2:vmax_b_frames=2:vb_strategy=1:precmp=2:cmp=2:subcmp=2:preme=2:qns=2 6fps 0dB High quality vcodec=mpeg4:mbd=2:trell:v4mv:last_pred=2:dia=-1:vmax_b_frames=2:vb_strategy=1:cmp=3:subcmp=3:precmp=0:vqcomp=0.6:turbo 15fps -0.5dB Fast vcodec=mpeg4:mbd=2:trell:v4mv:turbo 42fps -0.74dB Realtime vcodec=mpeg4:mbd=2:turbo 54fps -1.21dB With this feature of libavcodec you are able to set custom inter (I-frames/keyframes) and intra (P-frames/predicted frames) matrices. It is supported by many of the codecs: mpeg1video and mpeg2video are reported as working. A typical usage of this feature is to set the matrices preferred by the KVCD specifications. The KVCD "Notch" Quantization Matrix: Intra: 8 9 12 22 26 27 29 34 9 10 14 26 27 29 34 37 12 14 18 27 29 34 37 38 22 26 27 31 36 37 38 40 26 27 29 36 39 38 40 48 27 29 34 37 38 40 48 58 29 34 37 38 40 48 58 69 34 37 38 40 48 58 69 79 Inter: 16 18 20 22 24 26 28 30 18 20 22 24 26 28 30 32 20 22 24 26 28 30 32 34 22 24 26 30 32 32 34 36 24 26 28 32 34 34 36 38 26 28 30 32 34 36 38 40 28 30 32 34 36 38 42 42 30 32 34 36 38 40 42 44 Usage: mencoder input.avi -o output.avi -oac copy -ovc lavc \ -lavcopts inter_matrix=...:intra_matrix=... mencoder input.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts \ vcodec=mpeg2video:intra_matrix=8,9,12,22,26,27,29,34,9,10,14,26,27,29,34,37,\ 12,14,18,27,29,34,37,38,22,26,27,31,36,37,38,40,26,27,29,36,39,38,40,48,27,\ 29,34,37,38,40,48,58,29,34,37,38,40,48,58,69,34,37,38,40,48,58,69,79\ :inter_matrix=16,18,20,22,24,26,28,30,18,20,22,24,26,28,30,32,20,22,24,26,\ 28,30,32,34,22,24,26,30,32,32,34,36,24,26,28,32,34,34,36,38,26,28,30,32,34,\ 36,38,40,28,30,32,34,36,38,42,42,30,32,34,36,38,40,42,44 -oac copy -o svcd.mpg So, you have just bought your shiny new copy of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (widescreen edition, of course), and you want to rip this DVD so that you can add it to your Home Theatre PC. This is a region 1 DVD, so it is NTSC. The example below will still apply to PAL, except you will omit -ofps 24000/1001 (because the output framerate is the same as the input framerate), and of course the crop dimensions will be different. After running mplayer dvd://1, we follow the process detailed in the section How to deal with telecine and interlacing in NTSC DVDs and discover that it is 24000/1001 fps progressive video, which means that we need not use an inverse telecine filter, such as pullup or filmdint. Next, we want to determine the appropriate crop rectangle, so we use the cropdetect filter: mplayer dvd://1 -vf cropdetect Make sure you seek to a fully filled frame (such as a bright scene, past the opening credits and logos), and you will see in MPlayer's console output: crop area: X: 0..719 Y: 57..419 (-vf crop=720:362:0:58) We then play the movie back with this filter to test its correctness: mplayer dvd://1 -vf crop=720:362:0:58 And we see that it looks perfectly fine. Next, we ensure the width and height are a multiple of 16. The width is fine, however the height is not. Since we did not fail 7th grade math, we know that the nearest multiple of 16 lower than 362 is 352. We could just use crop=720:352:0:58, but it would be nice to take a little off the top and a little off the bottom so that we retain the center. We have shrunk the height by 10 pixels, but we do not want to increase the y-offset by 5-pixels since that is an odd number and will adversely affect quality. Instead, we will increase the y-offset by 4 pixels: mplayer dvd://1 -vf crop=720:352:0:62 Another reason to shave pixels from both the top and the bottom is that we ensure we have eliminated any half-black pixels if they exist. Note that if your video is telecined, make sure the pullup filter (or whichever inverse telecine filter you decide to use) appears in the filter chain before you crop. If it is interlaced, deinterlace before cropping. (If you choose to preserve the interlaced video, then make sure your vertical crop offset is a multiple of 4.) If you are really concerned about losing those 10 pixels, you might prefer instead to scale the dimensions down to the nearest multiple of 16. The filter chain would look like: -vf crop=720:362:0:58,scale=720:352 Scaling the video down like this will mean that some small amount of detail is lost, though it probably will not be perceptible. Scaling up will result in lower quality (unless you increase the bitrate). Cropping discards those pixels altogether. It is a tradeoff that you will want to consider for each circumstance. For example, if the DVD video was made for television, you might want to avoid vertical scaling, since the line sampling corresponds to the way the content was originally recorded. On inspection, we see that our movie has a fair bit of action and high amounts of detail, so we pick 2400Kbit for our bitrate. We are now ready to do the two pass encode. Pass one: mencoder dvd://1 -ofps 24000/1001 -oac copy -o Harry_Potter_2.avi -ovc lavc \ -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=2400:v4mv:mbd=2:trell:cmp=3:subcmp=3:autoaspect:vpass=1 \ -vf pullup,softskip,crop=720:352:0:62,hqdn3d=2:1:2 And pass two is the same, except that we specify vpass=2: mencoder dvd://1 -ofps 24000/1001 -oac copy -o Harry_Potter_2.avi -ovc lavc \ -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=2400:v4mv:mbd=2:trell:cmp=3:subcmp=3:autoaspect:vpass=2 \ -vf pullup,softskip,crop=720:352:0:62,hqdn3d=2:1:2 The options v4mv:mbd=2:trell will greatly increase the quality at the expense of encoding time. There is little reason to leave these options out when the primary goal is quality. The options cmp=3:subcmp=3 select a comparison function that yields higher quality than the defaults. You might try experimenting with this parameter (refer to the man page for the possible values) as different functions can have a large impact on quality depending on the source material. For example, if you find libavcodec produces too much blocky artifacts, you could try selecting the experimental NSSE as comparison function via *cmp=10. For this movie, the resulting AVI will be 138 minutes long and nearly 3GB. And because you said that file size does not matter, this is a perfectly acceptable size. However, if you had wanted it smaller, you could try a lower bitrate. Increasing bitrates have diminishing returns, so while we might clearly see an improvement from 1800Kbit to 2000Kbit, it might not be so noticeable above 2000Kbit. Feel free to experiment until you are happy. Because we passed the source video through a denoise filter, you may want to add some of it back during playback. This, along with the spp post-processing filter, drastically improves the perception of quality and helps eliminate blocky artifacts in the video. With MPlayer's autoq option, you can vary the amount of post-processing done by the spp filter depending on available CPU. Also, at this point, you may want to apply gamma and/or color correction to best suit your display. For example: mplayer Harry_Potter_2.avi -vf spp,noise=9ah:5ah,eq2=1.2 -autoq 3 Xvid is a free library for encoding MPEG-4 ASP video streams. Before starting to encode, you need to set up MEncoder to support it. This guide mainly aims at featuring the same kind of information as x264's encoding guide. Therefore, please begin by reading the first part of that guide. Please begin by reviewing the Xvid section of MPlayer's man page. This section is intended to be a supplement to the man page. The Xvid default settings are already a good tradeoff between speed and quality, therefore you can safely stick to them if the following section puzzles you. vhq This setting affects the macroblock decision algorithm, where the higher the setting, the wiser the decision. The default setting may be safely used for every encode, while higher settings always help PSNR but are significantly slower. Please note that a better PSNR does not necessarily mean that the picture will look better, but tells you that it is closer to the original. Turning it off will noticeably speed up encoding; if speed is critical for you, the tradeoff may be worth it. bvhq This does the same job as vhq, but does it on B-frames. It has a negligible impact on speed, and slightly improves quality (around +0.1dB PSNR). max_bframes A higher number of consecutive allowed B-frames usually improves compressibility, although it may also lead to more blocking artifacts. The default setting is a good tradeoff between compressibility and quality, but you may increase it up to 3 if you are bitrate-starved. You may also decrease it to 1 or 0 if you are aiming at perfect quality, though in that case you should make sure your target bitrate is high enough to ensure that the encoder does not have to increase quantizers to reach it. bf_threshold This controls the B-frame sensitivity of the encoder, where a higher value leads to more B-frames being used (and vice versa). This setting is to be used together with max_bframes; if you are bitrate-starved, you should increase both max_bframes and bf_threshold, while you may increase max_bframes and reduce bf_threshold so that the encoder may use more B-frames in places that only really need them. A low number of max_bframes and a high value of bf_threshold is probably not a wise choice as it will force the encoder to put B-frames in places that would not benefit from them, therefore reducing visual quality. However, if you need to be compatible with standalone players that only support old DivX profiles (which only supports up to 1 consecutive B-frame), this would be your only way to increase compressibility through using B-frames. trellis Optimizes the quantization process to get an optimal tradeoff between PSNR and bitrate, which allows significant bit saving. These bits will in return be spent elsewhere on the video, raising overall visual quality. You should always leave it on as its impact on quality is huge. Even if you are looking for speed, do not disable it until you have turned down vhq and all other more CPU-hungry options to the minimum. hq_ac Activates a better coefficient cost estimation method, which slightly reduces file size by around 0.15 to 0.19% (which corresponds to less than 0.01dB PSNR increase), while having a negligible impact on speed. It is therefore recommended to always leave it on. cartoon Designed to better encode cartoon content, and has no impact on speed as it just tunes the mode decision heuristics for this type of content. me_quality This setting is to control the precision of the motion estimation. The higher me_quality, the more precise the estimation of the original motion will be, and the better the resulting clip will capture the original motion. The default setting is best in all cases; thus it is not recommended to turn it down unless you are really looking for speed, as all the bits saved by a good motion estimation would be spent elsewhere, raising overall quality. Therefore, do not go any lower than 5, and even that only as a last resort. chroma_me Improves motion estimation by also taking the chroma (color) information into account, whereas me_quality alone only uses luma (grayscale). This slows down encoding by 5-10% but improves visual quality quite a bit by reducing blocking effects and reduces file size by around 1.3%. If you are looking for speed, you should disable this option before starting to consider reducing me_quality. chroma_opt Is intended to increase chroma image quality around pure white/black edges, rather than improving compression. This can help to reduce the "red stairs" effect. lumi_mask Tries to give less bitrate to part of the picture that the human eye cannot see very well, which should allow the encoder to spend the saved bits on more important parts of the picture. The quality of the encode yielded by this option highly depends on personal preferences and on the type and monitor settings used to watch it (typically, it will not look as good if it is bright or if it is a TFT monitor). qpel Raise the number of candidate motion vectors by increasing the precision of the motion estimation from halfpel to quarterpel. The idea is to find better motion vectors which will in return reduce bitrate (hence increasing quality). However, motion vectors with quarterpel precision require a few extra bits to code, but the candidate vectors do not always give (much) better results. Quite often, the codec still spends bits on the extra precision, but little or no extra quality is gained in return. Unfortunately, there is no way to foresee the possible gains of qpel, so you need to actually encode with and without it to know for sure. qpel can be almost double encoding time, and requires as much as 25% more processing power to decode. It is not supported by all standalone players. gmc Tries to save bits on panning scenes by using a single motion vector for the whole frame. This almost always raises PSNR, but significantly slows down encoding (as well as decoding). Therefore, you should only use it when you have turned vhq to the maximum. Xvid's GMC is more sophisticated than DivX's, but is only supported by few standalone players. Xvid supports encoding profiles through the profile option, which are used to impose restrictions on the properties of the Xvid video stream such that it will be playable on anything which supports the chosen profile. The restrictions relate to resolutions, bitrates and certain MPEG-4 features. The following table shows what each profile supports. Simple Advanced Simple DivX Profile name 0 1 2 3 0 1 2 3 4 5 Handheld Portable NTSC Portable PAL Home Theater NTSC Home Theater PAL HDTV Width [pixels] 176 176 352 352 176 176 352 352 352 720 176 352 352 720 720 1280 Height [pixels] 144 144 288 288 144 144 288 288 576 576 144 240 288 480 576 720 Frame rate [fps] 15 15 15 15 30 30 15 30 30 30 15 30 25 30 25 30 Max average bitrate [kbps] 64 64 128 384 128 128 384 768 3000 8000 537.6 4854 4854 4854 4854 9708.4 Peak average bitrate over 3 secs [kbps] 800 8000 8000 8000 8000 16000 Max. B-frames 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 2 MPEG quantization X X X X X X Adaptive quantization X X X X X X X X X X X X Interlaced encoding X X X X X X X X X Quarterpixel X X X X X X Global motion compensation X X X X X X The following settings are examples of different encoding option combinations that affect the speed vs quality tradeoff at the same target bitrate. All the encoding settings were tested on a 720x448 @30000/1001 fps video sample, the target bitrate was 900kbps, and the machine was an AMD-64 3400+ at 2400 MHz in 64 bits mode. Each encoding setting features the measured encoding speed (in frames per second) and the PSNR loss (in dB) compared to the "very high quality" setting. Please understand that depending on your source, your machine type and development advancements, you may get very different results. DescriptionEncoding optionsspeed (in fps)Relative PSNR loss (in dB) Very high quality chroma_opt:vhq=4:bvhq=1:quant_type=mpeg 16fps 0dB High quality vhq=2:bvhq=1:chroma_opt:quant_type=mpeg 18fps -0.1dB Fast turbo:vhq=0 28fps -0.69dB Realtime turbo:nochroma_me:notrellis:max_bframes=0:vhq=0 38fps -1.48dB x264 is a free library for encoding H.264/AVC video streams. Before starting to encode, you need to set up MEncoder to support it. Please begin by reviewing the x264 section of MPlayer's man page. This section is intended to be a supplement to the man page. Here you will find quick hints about which options are most likely to interest most people. The man page is more terse, but also more exhaustive, and it sometimes offers much better technical detail. This guide considers two major categories of encoding options: Options which mainly trade off encoding time vs. quality Options which may be useful for fulfilling various personal preferences and special requirements Ultimately, only you can decide which options are best for your purposes. The decision for the first class of options is the simplest: you only have to decide whether you think the quality differences justify the speed differences. For the second class of options, preferences may be far more subjective, and more factors may be involved. Note that some of the "personal preferences and special requirements" options can still have large impacts on speed or quality, but that is not what they are primarily useful for. A couple of the "personal preference" options may even cause changes that look better to some people, but look worse to others. Before continuing, you need to understand that this guide uses only one quality metric: global PSNR. For a brief explanation of what PSNR is, see the Wikipedia article on PSNR. Global PSNR is the last PSNR number reported when you include the psnr option in x264encopts. Any time you read a claim about PSNR, one of the assumptions behind the claim is that equal bitrates are used. Nearly all of this guide's comments assume you are using two pass. When comparing options, there are two major reasons for using two pass encoding. First, using two pass often gains around 1dB PSNR, which is a very big difference. Secondly, testing options by doing direct quality comparisons with one pass encodes introduces a major confounding factor: bitrate often varies significantly with each encode. It is not always easy to tell whether quality changes are due mainly to changed options, or if they mostly reflect essentially random differences in the achieved bitrate. subq: Of the options which allow you to trade off speed for quality, subq and frameref (see below) are usually by far the most important. If you are interested in tweaking either speed or quality, these are the first options you should consider. On the speed dimension, the frameref and subq options interact with each other fairly strongly. Experience shows that, with one reference frame, subq=5 (the default setting) takes about 35% more time than subq=1. With 6 reference frames, the penalty grows to over 60%. subq's effect on PSNR seems fairly constant regardless of the number of reference frames. Typically, subq=5 achieves 0.2-0.5 dB higher global PSNR in comparison subq=1. This is usually enough to be visible. subq=6 is slower and yields better quality at a reasonable cost. In comparison to subq=5, it usually gains 0.1-0.4 dB global PSNR with speed costs varying from 25%-100%. Unlike other levels of subq, the behavior of subq=6 does not depend much on frameref and me. Instead, the effectiveness of subq=6 depends mostly upon the number of B-frames used. In normal usage, this means subq=6 has a large impact on both speed and quality in complex, high motion scenes, but it may not have much effect in low-motion scenes. Note that it is still recommended to always set bframes to something other than zero (see below). subq=7 is the slowest, highest quality mode. In comparison to subq=6, it usually gains 0.01-0.05 dB global PSNR with speed costs varying from 15%-33%. Since the tradeoff encoding time vs. quality is quite low, you should only use it if you are after every bit saving and if encoding time is not an issue. frameref: frameref is set to 1 by default, but this should not be taken to imply that it is reasonable to set it to 1. Merely raising frameref to 2 gains around 0.15dB PSNR with a 5-10% speed penalty; this seems like a good tradeoff. frameref=3 gains around 0.25dB PSNR over frameref=1, which should be a visible difference. frameref=3 is around 15% slower than frameref=1. Unfortunately, diminishing returns set in rapidly. frameref=6 can be expected to gain only 0.05-0.1 dB over frameref=3 at an additional 15% speed penalty. Above frameref=6, the quality gains are usually very small (although you should keep in mind throughout this whole discussion that it can vary quite a lot depending on your source). In a fairly typical case, frameref=12 will improve global PSNR by a tiny 0.02dB over frameref=6, at a speed cost of 15%-20%. At such high frameref values, the only really good thing that can be said is that increasing it even further will almost certainly never harm PSNR, but the additional quality benefits are barely even measurable, let alone perceptible. Raising frameref to unnecessarily high values can and usually does hurt coding efficiency if you turn CABAC off. With CABAC on (the default behavior), the possibility of setting frameref "too high" currently seems too remote to even worry about, and in the future, optimizations may remove the possibility altogether. If you care about speed, a reasonable compromise is to use low subq and frameref values on the first pass, and then raise them on the second pass. Typically, this has a negligible negative effect on the final quality: You will probably lose well under 0.1dB PSNR, which should be much too small of a difference to see. However, different values of frameref can occasionally affect frame type decision. Most likely, these are rare outlying cases, but if you want to be pretty sure, consider whether your video has either fullscreen repetitive flashing patterns or very large temporary occlusions which might force an I-frame. Adjust the first-pass frameref so it is large enough to contain the duration of the flashing cycle (or occlusion). For example, if the scene flashes back and forth between two images over a duration of three frames, set the first pass frameref to 3 or higher. This issue is probably extremely rare in live action video material, but it does sometimes come up in video game captures. me: This option is for choosing the motion estimation search method. Altering this option provides a straightforward quality-vs-speed tradeoff. me=dia is only a few percent faster than the default search, at a cost of under 0.1dB global PSNR. The default setting (me=hex) is a reasonable tradeoff between speed and quality. me=umh gains a little under 0.1dB global PSNR, with a speed penalty that varies depending on frameref. At high values of frameref (e.g. 12 or so), me=umh is about 40% slower than the default me=hex. With frameref=3, the speed penalty incurred drops to 25%-30%. me=esa uses an exhaustive search that is too slow for practical use. partitions=all: This option enables the use of 8x4, 4x8 and 4x4 subpartitions in predicted macroblocks (in addition to the default partitions). Enabling it results in a fairly consistent 10%-15% loss of speed. This option is rather useless in source containing only low motion, however in some high-motion source, particularly source with lots of small moving objects, gains of about 0.1dB can be expected. bframes: If you are used to encoding with other codecs, you may have found that B-frames are not always useful. In H.264, this has changed: there are new techniques and block types that are possible in B-frames. Usually, even a naive B-frame choice algorithm can have a significant PSNR benefit. It is interesting to note that using B-frames usually speeds up the second pass somewhat, and may also speed up a single pass encode if adaptive B-frame decision is turned off. With adaptive B-frame decision turned off (x264encopts's nob_adapt), the optimal value for this setting is usually no more than bframes=1, or else high-motion scenes can suffer. With adaptive B-frame decision on (the default behavior), it is safe to use higher values; the encoder will reduce the use of B-frames in scenes where they would hurt compression. The encoder rarely chooses to use more than 3 or 4 B-frames; setting this option any higher will have little effect. b_adapt: Note: This is on by default. With this option enabled, the encoder will use a reasonably fast decision process to reduce the number of B-frames used in scenes that might not benefit from them as much. You can use b_bias to tweak how B-frame-happy the encoder is. The speed penalty of adaptive B-frames is currently rather modest, but so is the potential quality gain. It usually does not hurt, however. Note that this only affects speed and frame type decision on the first pass. b_adapt and b_bias have no effect on subsequent passes. b_pyramid: You might as well enable this option if you are using >=2 B-frames; as the man page says, you get a little quality improvement at no speed cost. Note that these videos cannot be read by libavcodec-based decoders older than about March 5, 2005. weight_b: In typical cases, there is not much gain with this option. However, in crossfades or fade-to-black scenes, weighted prediction gives rather large bitrate savings. In MPEG-4 ASP, a fade-to-black is usually best coded as a series of expensive I-frames; using weighted prediction in B-frames makes it possible to turn at least some of these into much smaller B-frames. Encoding time cost is minimal, as no extra decisions need to be made. Also, contrary to what some people seem to guess, the decoder CPU requirements are not much affected by weighted prediction, all else being equal. Unfortunately, the current adaptive B-frame decision algorithm has a strong tendency to avoid B-frames during fades. Until this changes, it may be a good idea to add nob_adapt to your x264encopts, if you expect fades to have a large effect in your particular video clip. threads: This option allows to spawn threads to encode in parallel on multiple CPUs. You can manually select the number of threads to be created or, better, set threads=auto and let x264 detect how many CPUs are available and pick an appropriate number of threads. If you have a multi-processor machine, you should really consider using it as it can to increase encoding speed linearly with the number of CPU cores (about 94% per CPU core), with very little quality reduction (about 0.005dB for dual processor, about 0.01dB for a quad processor machine). Two pass encoding: Above, it was suggested to always use two pass encoding, but there are still reasons for not using it. For instance, if you are capturing live TV and encoding in realtime, you are forced to use single-pass. Also, one pass is obviously faster than two passes; if you use the exact same set of options on both passes, two pass encoding is almost twice as slow. Still, there are very good reasons for using two pass encoding. For one thing, single pass ratecontrol is not psychic, and it often makes unreasonable choices because it cannot see the big picture. For example, suppose you have a two minute long video consisting of two distinct halves. The first half is a very high-motion scene lasting 60 seconds which, in isolation, requires about 2500kbps in order to look decent. Immediately following it is a much less demanding 60-second scene that looks good at 300kbps. Suppose you ask for 1400kbps on the theory that this is enough to accommodate both scenes. Single pass ratecontrol will make a couple of "mistakes" in such a case. First of all, it will target 1400kbps in both segments. The first segment may end up heavily overquantized, causing it to look unacceptably and unreasonably blocky. The second segment will be heavily underquantized; it may look perfect, but the bitrate cost of that perfection will be completely unreasonable. What is even harder to avoid is the problem at the transition between the two scenes. The first seconds of the low motion half will be hugely over-quantized, because the ratecontrol is still expecting the kind of bitrate requirements it met in the first half of the video. This "error period" of heavily over-quantized low motion will look jarringly bad, and will actually use less than the 300kbps it would have taken to make it look decent. There are ways to mitigate the pitfalls of single-pass encoding, but they may tend to increase bitrate misprediction. Multipass ratecontrol can offer huge advantages over a single pass. Using the statistics gathered from the first pass encode, the encoder can estimate, with reasonable accuracy, the "cost" (in bits) of encoding any given frame, at any given quantizer. This allows for a much more rational, better planned allocation of bits between the expensive (high-motion) and cheap (low-motion) scenes. See qcomp below for some ideas on how to tweak this allocation to your liking. Moreover, two passes need not take twice as long as one pass. You can tweak the options in the first pass for higher speed and lower quality. If you choose your options well, you can get a very fast first pass. The resulting quality in the second pass will be slightly lower because size prediction is less accurate, but the quality difference is normally much too small to be visible. Try, for example, adding subq=1:frameref=1 to the first pass x264encopts. Then, on the second pass, use slower, higher-quality options: subq=6:frameref=15:partitions=all:me=umh Three pass encoding? x264 offers the ability to make an arbitrary number of consecutive passes. If you specify pass=1 on the first pass, then use pass=3 on a subsequent pass, the subsequent pass will both read the statistics from the previous pass, and write its own statistics. An additional pass following this one will have a very good base from which to make highly accurate predictions of frame sizes at a chosen quantizer. In practice, the overall quality gain from this is usually close to zero, and quite possibly a third pass will result in slightly worse global PSNR than the pass before it. In typical usage, three passes help if you get either bad bitrate prediction or bad looking scene transitions when using only two passes. This is somewhat likely to happen on extremely short clips. There are also a few special cases in which three (or more) passes are handy for advanced users, but for brevity, this guide omits discussing those special cases. qcomp: qcomp trades off the number of bits allocated to "expensive" high-motion versus "cheap" low-motion frames. At one extreme, qcomp=0 aims for true constant bitrate. Typically this would make high-motion scenes look completely awful, while low-motion scenes would probably look absolutely perfect, but would also use many times more bitrate than they would need in order to look merely excellent. At the other extreme, qcomp=1 achieves nearly constant quantization parameter (QP). Constant QP does not look bad, but most people think it is more reasonable to shave some bitrate off of the extremely expensive scenes (where the loss of quality is not as noticeable) and reallocate it to the scenes that are easier to encode at excellent quality. qcomp is set to 0.6 by default, which may be slightly low for many peoples' taste (0.7-0.8 are also commonly used). keyint: keyint is solely for trading off file seekability against coding efficiency. By default, keyint is set to 250. In 25fps material, this guarantees the ability to seek to within 10 seconds precision. If you think it would be important and useful to be able to seek within 5 seconds of precision, set keyint=125; this will hurt quality/bitrate slightly. If you care only about quality and not about seekability, you can set it to much higher values (understanding that there are diminishing returns which may become vanishingly low, or even zero). The video stream will still have seekable points as long as there are some scene changes. deblock: This topic is going to be a bit controversial. H.264 defines a simple deblocking procedure on I-blocks that uses pre-set strengths and thresholds depending on the QP of the block in question. By default, high QP blocks are filtered heavily, and low QP blocks are not deblocked at all. The pre-set strengths defined by the standard are well-chosen and the odds are very good that they are PSNR-optimal for whatever video you are trying to encode. The deblock allow you to specify offsets to the preset deblocking thresholds. Many people seem to think it is a good idea to lower the deblocking filter strength by large amounts (say, -3). This is however almost never a good idea, and in most cases, people who are doing this do not understand very well how deblocking works by default. The first and most important thing to know about the in-loop deblocking filter is that the default thresholds are almost always PSNR-optimal. In the rare cases that they are not optimal, the ideal offset is plus or minus 1. Adjusting deblocking parameters by a larger amount is almost guaranteed to hurt PSNR. Strengthening the filter will smear more details; weakening the filter will increase the appearance of blockiness. It is definitely a bad idea to lower the deblocking thresholds if your source is mainly low in spacial complexity (i.e., not a lot of detail or noise). The in-loop filter does a rather excellent job of concealing the artifacts that occur. If the source is high in spacial complexity, however, artifacts are less noticeable. This is because the ringing tends to look like detail or noise. Human visual perception easily notices when detail is removed, but it does not so easily notice when the noise is wrongly represented. When it comes to subjective quality, noise and detail are somewhat interchangeable. By lowering the deblocking filter strength, you are most likely increasing error by adding ringing artifacts, but the eye does not notice because it confuses the artifacts with detail. This still does not justify lowering the deblocking filter strength, however. You can generally get better quality noise from postprocessing. If your H.264 encodes look too blurry or smeared, try playing with -vf noise when you play your encoded movie. -vf noise=8a:4a should conceal most mild artifacts. It will almost certainly look better than the results you would have gotten just by fiddling with the deblocking filter. The following settings are examples of different encoding option combinations that affect the speed vs quality tradeoff at the same target bitrate. All the encoding settings were tested on a 720x448 @30000/1001 fps video sample, the target bitrate was 900kbps, and the machine was an AMD-64 3400+ at 2400 MHz in 64 bits mode. Each encoding setting features the measured encoding speed (in frames per second) and the PSNR loss (in dB) compared to the "very high quality" setting. Please understand that depending on your source, your machine type and development advancements, you may get very different results. Description Encoding options speed (in fps) Relative PSNR loss (in dB) Very high quality subq=6:partitions=all:8x8dct:me=umh:frameref=5:bframes=3:b_pyramid:weight_b 6fps 0dB High quality subq=5:8x8dct:frameref=2:bframes=3:b_pyramid:weight_b 13fps -0.89dB Fast subq=4:bframes=2:b_pyramid:weight_b 17fps -1.48dB Video for Windows provides simple encoding by means of binary video codecs. You can encode with the following codecs (if you have more, please tell us!) Note that support for this is very experimental and some codecs may not work correctly. Some codecs will only work in certain colorspaces, try -vf format=bgr24 and -vf format=yuy2 if a codec fails or gives wrong output. Video codec file name Description (FourCC) md5sum Comment aslcodec_vfw.dll Alparysoft lossless codec vfw (ASLC) 608af234a6ea4d90cdc7246af5f3f29a avimszh.dll AVImszh (MSZH) 253118fe1eedea04a95ed6e5f4c28878 needs -vf format avizlib.dll AVIzlib (ZLIB) 2f1cc76bbcf6d77d40d0e23392fa8eda divx.dll DivX4Windows-VFW acf35b2fc004a89c829531555d73f1e6 huffyuv.dll HuffYUV (lossless) (HFYU) b74695b50230be4a6ef2c4293a58ac3b iccvid.dll Cinepak Video (cvid) cb3b7ee47ba7dbb3d23d34e274895133 icmw_32.dll Motion Wavelets (MWV1) c9618a8fc73ce219ba918e3e09e227f2 jp2avi.dll ImagePower MJPEG2000 (IPJ2) d860a11766da0d0ea064672c6833768b -vf flip m3jp2k32.dll Morgan MJPEG2000 (MJ2C) f3c174edcbaef7cb947d6357cdfde7ff m3jpeg32.dll Morgan Motion JPEG Codec (MJPEG) 1cd13fff5960aa2aae43790242c323b1 mpg4c32.dll Microsoft MPEG-4 v1/v2 b5791ea23f33010d37ab8314681f1256 tsccvid.dll TechSmith Camtasia Screen Codec (TSCC) 8230d8560c41d444f249802a2700d1d5 shareware error on windows vp31vfw.dll On2 Open Source VP3 Codec (VP31) 845f3590ea489e2e45e876ab107ee7d2 vp4vfw.dll On2 VP4 Personal Codec (VP40) fc5480a482ccc594c2898dcc4188b58f vp6vfw.dll On2 VP6 Personal Codec (VP60) 04d635a364243013898fd09484f913fb vp7vfw.dll On2 VP7 Personal Codec (VP70) cb4cc3d4ea7c94a35f1d81c3d750bc8d -ffourcc VP70 ViVD2.dll SoftMedia ViVD V2 codec VfW (GXVE) a7b4bf5cac630bb9262c3f80d8a773a1 msulvc06.DLL MSU Lossless codec (MSUD) 294bf9288f2f127bb86f00bfcc9ccdda Decodable by Window Media Player, not MPlayer (yet). camcodec.dll CamStudio lossless video codec (CSCD) 0efe97ce08bb0e40162ab15ef3b45615 sf.net/projects/camstudio The first column contains the codec names that should be passed after the codec parameter, like: -xvfwopts codec=divx.dll The FourCC code used by each codec is given in the parentheses. An example to convert an ISO DVD trailer to a VP6 flash video file using compdata bitrate settings: mencoder -dvd-device zeiram.iso dvd://7 -o trailer.flv \ -ovc vfw -xvfwopts codec=vp6vfw.dll:compdata=onepass.mcf -oac mp3lame \ -lameopts cbr:br=64 -af lavcresample=22050 -vf yadif,scale=320:240,flip \ -of lavf To encode with the Video for Windows codecs, you will need to set bitrate and other options. This is known to work on x86 on both *NIX and Windows. First you must build the vfw2menc program. It is located in the TOOLS subdirectory of the MPlayer source tree. To build on Linux, this can be done using Wine: winegcc vfw2menc.c -o vfw2menc -lwinmm -lole32 To build on Windows in MinGW or Cygwin use: gcc vfw2menc.c -o vfw2menc.exe -lwinmm -lole32 To build on MSVC you will need getopt. Getopt can be found in the original vfw2menc archive available at: The MPlayer on win32 project. Below is an example with the VP6 codec. vfw2menc -f VP62 -d vp6vfw.dll -s firstpass.mcf This will open the VP6 codec dialog window. Repeat this step for the second pass and use -s secondpass.mcf. Windows users can use -xvfwopts codec=vp6vfw.dll:compdata=dialog to have the codec dialog display before encoding starts. There are several reasons why producing QuickTime-compatible files can be desirable. You want any computer illiterate to be able to watch your encode on any major platform (Windows, Mac OS X, Unices …). QuickTime is able to take advantage of more hardware and software acceleration features of Mac OS X than platform-independent players like MPlayer or VLC. That means that your encodes have a chance to be played smoothly by older G4-powered machines. QuickTime 7 supports the next-generation codec H.264, which yields significantly better picture quality than previous codec generations (MPEG-2, MPEG-4 …). QuickTime 7 supports H.264 video and AAC audio, but it does not support them muxed in the AVI container format. However, you can use MEncoder to encode the video and audio, and then use an external program such as mp4creator (part of the MPEG4IP suite) to remux the video and audio tracks into an MP4 container. QuickTime's support for H.264 is limited, so you will need to drop some advanced features. If you encode your video with features that QuickTime 7 does not support, QuickTime-based players will show you a pretty white screen instead of your expected video. B-frames: QuickTime 7 supports a maximum of 1 B-frame, i.e. -x264encopts bframes=1. This means that b_pyramid and weight_b will have no effect, since they require bframes to be greater than 1. Macroblocks: QuickTime 7 does not support 8x8 DCT macroblocks. This option (8x8dct) is off by default, so just be sure not to explicitly enable it. This also means that the i8x8 option will have no effect, since it requires 8x8dct. Aspect ratio: QuickTime 7 does not support SAR (sample aspect ratio) information in MPEG-4 files; it assumes that SAR=1. Read the section on scaling for a workaround. Suppose you want to rip your freshly bought copy of "The Chronicles of Narnia". Your DVD is region 1, which means it is NTSC. The example below would still apply to PAL, except you would omit -ofps 24000/1001 and use slightly different crop and scale dimensions. After running mplayer dvd://1, you follow the process detailed in the section How to deal with telecine and interlacing in NTSC DVDs and discover that it is 24000/1001 fps progressive video. This simplifies the process somewhat, since you do not need to use an inverse telecine filter such as pullup or a deinterlacing filter such as yadif. Next, you need to crop out the black bars from the top and bottom of the video, as detailed in this previous section. The next step is truly heartbreaking. QuickTime 7 does not support MPEG-4 videos with a sample aspect ratio other than 1, so you will need to upscale (which wastes a lot of disk space) or downscale (which loses some details of the source) the video to square pixels. Either way you do it, this is highly inefficient, but simply cannot be avoided if you want your video to be playable by QuickTime 7. MEncoder can apply the appropriate upscaling or downscaling by specifying respectively -vf scale=-10:-1 or -vf scale=-1:-10. This will scale your video to the correct width for the cropped height, rounded to the closest multiple of 16 for optimal compression. Remember that if you are cropping, you should crop first, then scale: -vf crop=720:352:0:62,scale=-10:-1 Because you will be remuxing into a different container, you should always use the harddup option to ensure that duplicated frames are actually duplicated in the video output. Without this option, MEncoder will simply put a marker in the video stream that a frame was duplicated, and rely on the client software to show the same frame twice. Unfortunately, this "soft duplication" does not survive remuxing, so the audio would slowly lose sync with the video. The final filter chain looks like this: -vf crop=720:352:0:62,scale=-10:-1,harddup As always, the selection of bitrate is a matter of the technical properties of the source, as explained here, as well as a matter of taste. This movie has a fair bit of action and lots of detail, but H.264 video looks good at much lower bitrates than XviD or other MPEG-4 codecs. After much experimentation, the author of this guide chose to encode this movie at 900kbps, and thought that it looked very good. You may decrease bitrate if you need to save more space, or increase it if you need to improve quality. You are now ready to encode the video. Since you care about quality, of course you will be doing a two-pass encode. To shave off some encoding time, you can specify the turbo option on the first pass; this reduces subq and frameref to 1. To save some disk space, you can use the ss option to strip off the first few seconds of the video. (I found that this particular movie has 32 seconds of credits and logos.) bframes can be 0 or 1. The other options are documented in Encoding with the x264 codec and the man page. mencoder dvd://1 -o /dev/null -ss 32 -ovc x264 \ -x264encopts pass=1:turbo:bitrate=900:bframes=1:\ me=umh:partitions=all:trellis=1:qp_step=4:qcomp=0.7:direct_pred=auto:keyint=300 \ -vf crop=720:352:0:62,scale=-10:-1,harddup \ -oac faac -faacopts br=192:mpeg=4:object=2 -channels 2 -srate 48000 \ -ofps 24000/1001 If you have a multi-processor machine, don't miss the opportunity to dramatically speed-up encoding by enabling x264's multi-threading mode by adding threads=auto to your x264encopts command-line. The second pass is the same, except that you specify the output file and set pass=2. mencoder dvd://1 -o narnia.avi -ss 32 -ovc x264 \ -x264encopts pass=2:turbo:bitrate=900:frameref=5:bframes=1:\ me=umh:partitions=all:trellis=1:qp_step=4:qcomp=0.7:direct_pred=auto:keyint=300 \ -vf crop=720:352:0:62,scale=-10:-1,harddup \ -oac faac -faacopts br=192:mpeg=4:object=2 -channels 2 -srate 48000 \ -ofps 24000/1001 The resulting AVI should play perfectly in MPlayer, but of course QuickTime can not play it because it does not support H.264 muxed in AVI. So the next step is to remux the video into an MP4 container. There are several ways to remux AVI files to MP4. You can use mp4creator, which is part of the MPEG4IP suite. First, demux the AVI into separate audio and video streams using MPlayer. mplayer narnia.avi -dumpaudio -dumpfile narnia.aac mplayer narnia.avi -dumpvideo -dumpfile narnia.h264 The file names are important; mp4creator requires that AAC audio streams be named .aac and H.264 video streams be named .h264. Now use mp4creator to create a new MP4 file out of the audio and video streams. mp4creator -create=narnia.aac narnia.mp4 mp4creator -create=narnia.h264 -rate=23.976 narnia.mp4 Unlike the encoding step, you must specify the framerate as a decimal (such as 23.976), not a fraction (such as 24000/1001). This narnia.mp4 file should now be playable with any QuickTime 7 application, such as QuickTime Player or iTunes. If you are planning to view the video in a web browser with the QuickTime plugin, you should also hint the movie so that the QuickTime plugin can start playing it while it is still downloading. mp4creator can create these hint tracks: mp4creator -hint=1 narnia.mp4 mp4creator -hint=2 narnia.mp4 mp4creator -optimize narnia.mp4 You can check the final result to ensure that the hint tracks were created successfully: mp4creator -list narnia.mp4 You should see a list of tracks: 1 audio, 1 video, and 2 hint tracks. Track Type Info 1 audio MPEG-4 AAC LC, 8548.714 secs, 190 kbps, 48000 Hz 2 video H264 Main@5.1, 8549.132 secs, 899 kbps, 848x352 @ 23.976001 fps 3 hint Payload mpeg4-generic for track 1 4 hint Payload H264 for track 2 If you want to add tags to your video that show up in iTunes, you can use AtomicParsley. AtomicParsley narnia.mp4 --metaEnema --title "The Chronicles of Narnia" --year 2005 --stik Movie --freefree --overWrite The --metaEnema option removes any existing metadata (mp4creator inserts its name in the "encoding tool" tag), and --freefree reclaims the space from the deleted metadata. The --stik option sets the type of video (such as Movie or TV Show), which iTunes uses to group related video files. The --overWrite option overwrites the original file; without it, AtomicParsley creates a new auto-named file in the same directory and leaves the original file untouched. MEncoder is capable of creating VCD, SCVD and DVD format MPEG files using the libavcodec library. These files can then be used in conjunction with vcdimager or dvdauthor to create discs that will play on a standard set-top player. The DVD, SVCD, and VCD formats are subject to heavy constraints. Only a small selection of encoded picture sizes and aspect ratios are available. If your movie does not already meet these requirements, you may have to scale, crop or add black borders to the picture to make it compliant. Format Resolution V. Codec V. Bitrate Sample Rate A. Codec A. Bitrate FPS Aspect NTSC DVD 720x480, 704x480, 352x480, 352x240 MPEG-2 9800 kbps 48000 Hz AC-3,PCM 1536 kbps (max) 30000/1001, 24000/1001 4:3, 16:9 (only for 720x480) NTSC DVD 352x240 These resolutions are rarely used for DVDs because they are fairly low quality. MPEG-1 1856 kbps 48000 Hz AC-3,PCM 1536 kbps (max) 30000/1001, 24000/1001 4:3, 16:9 NTSC SVCD 480x480 MPEG-2 2600 kbps 44100 Hz MP2 384 kbps (max) 30000/1001 4:3 NTSC VCD 352x240 MPEG-1 1150 kbps 44100 Hz MP2 224 kbps 24000/1001, 30000/1001 4:3 PAL DVD 720x576, 704x576, 352x576, 352x288 MPEG-2 9800 kbps 48000 Hz MP2,AC-3,PCM 1536 kbps (max) 25 4:3, 16:9 (only for 720x576) PAL DVD 352x288 MPEG-1 1856 kbps 48000 Hz MP2,AC-3,PCM 1536 kbps (max) 25 4:3, 16:9 PAL SVCD 480x576 MPEG-2 2600 kbps 44100 Hz MP2 384 kbps (max) 25 4:3 PAL VCD 352x288 MPEG-1 1152 kbps 44100 Hz MP2 224 kbps 25 4:3 If your movie has 2.35:1 aspect (most recent action movies), you will have to add black borders or crop the movie down to 16:9 to make a DVD or VCD. If you add black borders, try to align them at 16-pixel boundaries in order to minimize the impact on encoding performance. Thankfully DVD has sufficiently excessive bitrate that you do not have to worry too much about encoding efficiency, but SVCD and VCD are highly bitrate-starved and require effort to obtain acceptable quality. DVD, VCD, and SVCD also constrain you to relatively low GOP (Group of Pictures) sizes. For 30 fps material the largest allowed GOP size is 18. For 25 or 24 fps, the maximum is 15. The GOP size is set using the keyint option. VCD video is required to be CBR at 1152 kbps. This highly limiting constraint also comes along with an extremely low vbv buffer size of 327 kilobits. SVCD allows varying video bitrates up to 2500 kbps, and a somewhat less restrictive vbv buffer size of 917 kilobits is allowed. DVD video bitrates may range anywhere up to 9800 kbps (though typical bitrates are about half that), and the vbv buffer size is 1835 kilobits. MEncoder has options to control the output format. Using these options we can instruct it to create the correct type of file. The options for VCD and SVCD are called xvcd and xsvcd, because they are extended formats. They are not strictly compliant, mainly because the output does not contain scan offsets. If you need to generate an SVCD image, you should pass the output file to vcdimager. VCD: -of mpeg -mpegopts format=xvcd SVCD: -of mpeg -mpegopts format=xsvcd DVD (with timestamps on every frame, if possible): -of mpeg -mpegopts format=dvd:tsaf DVD with NTSC Pullup: -of mpeg -mpegopts format=dvd:tsaf:telecine -ofps 24000/1001 This allows 24000/1001 fps progressive content to be encoded at 30000/1001 fps whilst maintaining DVD-compliance. The aspect argument of -lavcopts is used to encode the aspect ratio of the file. During playback the aspect ratio is used to restore the video to the correct size. 16:9 or "Widescreen" -lavcopts aspect=16/9 4:3 or "Fullscreen" -lavcopts aspect=4/3 2.35:1 or "Cinemascope" NTSC -vf scale=720:368,expand=720:480 -lavcopts aspect=16/9 To calculate the correct scaling size, use the expanded NTSC width of 854/2.35 = 368 2.35:1 or "Cinemascope" PAL -vf scale=720:432,expand=720:576 -lavcopts aspect=16/9 To calculate the correct scaling size, use the expanded PAL width of 1024/2.35 = 432 In order to maintain audio/video synchronization throughout the encode, MEncoder has to drop or duplicate frames. This works rather well when muxing into an AVI file, but is almost guaranteed to fail to maintain A/V sync with other muxers such as MPEG. This is why it is necessary to append the harddup video filter at the end of the filter chain to avoid this kind of problem. You can find more technical information about harddup in the section Improving muxing and A/V sync reliability or in the manual page. If the audio sample rate in the original file is not the same as required by the target format, sample rate conversion is required. This is achieved using the -srate option and the -af lavcresample audio filter together. DVD: -srate 48000 -af lavcresample=48000 VCD and SVCD: -srate 44100 -af lavcresample=44100 libavcodec can be used to create VCD/SVCD/DVD compliant video by using the appropriate options. This is a list of fields in -lavcopts that you may be required to change in order to make a complaint movie for VCD, SVCD, or DVD: acodec: mp2 for VCD, SVCD, or PAL DVD; ac3 is most commonly used for DVD. PCM audio may also be used for DVD, but this is mostly a big waste of space. Note that MP3 audio is not compliant for any of these formats, but players often have no problem playing it anyway. abitrate: 224 for VCD; up to 384 for SVCD; up to 1536 for DVD, but commonly used values range from 192 kbps for stereo to 384 kbps for 5.1 channel sound. vcodec: mpeg1video for VCD; mpeg2video for SVCD; mpeg2video is usually used for DVD but you may also use mpeg1video for CIF resolutions. keyint: Used to set the GOP size. 18 for 30fps material, or 15 for 25/24 fps material. Commercial producers seem to prefer keyframe intervals of 12. It is possible to make this much larger and still retain compatibility with most players. A keyint of 25 should never cause any problems. vrc_buf_size: 327 for VCD, 917 for SVCD, and 1835 for DVD. vrc_minrate: 1152, for VCD. May be left alone for SVCD and DVD. vrc_maxrate: 1152 for VCD; 2500 for SVCD; 9800 for DVD. For SVCD and DVD, you might wish to use lower values depending on your own personal preferences and requirements. vbitrate: 1152 for VCD; up to 2500 for SVCD; up to 9800 for DVD. For the latter two formats, vbitrate should be set based on personal preference. For instance, if you insist on fitting 20 or so hours on a DVD, you could use vbitrate=400. The resulting video quality would probably be quite bad. If you are trying to squeeze out the maximum possible quality on a DVD, use vbitrate=9800, but be warned that this could constrain you to less than an hour of video on a single-layer DVD. vstrict: vstrict=0 should be used to create DVDs. Without this option, MEncoder creates a stream that cannot be correctly decoded by some standalone DVD players. This is a typical minimum set of -lavcopts for encoding video: VCD: -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg1video:vrc_buf_size=327:vrc_minrate=1152:\ vrc_maxrate=1152:vbitrate=1152:keyint=15:acodec=mp2 SVCD: -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg2video:vrc_buf_size=917:vrc_maxrate=2500:vbitrate=1800:\ keyint=15:acodec=mp2 DVD: -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg2video:vrc_buf_size=1835:vrc_maxrate=9800:vbitrate=5000:\ keyint=15:vstrict=0:acodec=ac3 For higher quality encoding, you may also wish to add quality-enhancing options to lavcopts, such as trell, mbd=2, and others. Note that qpel and v4mv, while often useful with MPEG-4, are not usable with MPEG-1 or MPEG-2. Also, if you are trying to make a very high quality DVD encode, it may be useful to add dc=10 to lavcopts. Doing so may help reduce the appearance of blocks in flat-colored areas. Putting it all together, this is an example of a set of lavcopts for a higher quality DVD: -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg2video:vrc_buf_size=1835:vrc_maxrate=9800:vbitrate=8000:\ keyint=15:trell:mbd=2:precmp=2:subcmp=2:cmp=2:dia=-10:predia=-10:cbp:mv0:\ vqmin=1:lmin=1:dc=10:vstrict=0 VCD and SVCD support MPEG-1 layer II audio, using one of toolame, twolame, or libavcodec's MP2 encoder. The libavcodec MP2 is far from being as good as the other two libraries, however it should always be available to use. VCD only supports constant bitrate audio (CBR) whereas SVCD supports variable bitrate (VBR), too. Be careful when using VBR because some bad standalone players might not support it too well. For DVD audio, libavcodec's AC-3 codec is used. For VCD and SVCD: -oac toolame -toolameopts br=224 For VCD and SVCD: -oac twolame -twolameopts br=224 For DVD with 2 channel sound: -oac lavc -lavcopts acodec=ac3:abitrate=192 For DVD with 5.1 channel sound: -channels 6 -oac lavc -lavcopts acodec=ac3:abitrate=384 For VCD and SVCD: -oac lavc -lavcopts acodec=mp2:abitrate=224 This section shows some complete commands for creating VCD/SVCD/DVD compliant videos. mencoder -oac lavc -ovc lavc -of mpeg -mpegopts format=dvd:tsaf \ -vf scale=720:576,harddup -srate 48000 -af lavcresample=48000 \ -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg2video:vrc_buf_size=1835:vrc_maxrate=9800:vbitrate=5000:\ keyint=15:vstrict=0:acodec=ac3:abitrate=192:aspect=16/9 -ofps 25 \ -o movie.mpg movie.avi mencoder -oac lavc -ovc lavc -of mpeg -mpegopts format=dvd:tsaf \ -vf scale=720:480,harddup -srate 48000 -af lavcresample=48000 \ -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg2video:vrc_buf_size=1835:vrc_maxrate=9800:vbitrate=5000:\ keyint=18:vstrict=0:acodec=ac3:abitrate=192:aspect=16/9 -ofps 30000/1001 \ -o movie.mpg movie.avi If the source already has AC-3 audio, use -oac copy instead of re-encoding it. mencoder -oac copy -ovc lavc -of mpeg -mpegopts format=dvd:tsaf \ -vf scale=720:576,harddup -ofps 25 \ -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg2video:vrc_buf_size=1835:vrc_maxrate=9800:vbitrate=5000:\ keyint=15:vstrict=0:aspect=16/9 -o movie.mpg movie.avi If the source already has AC-3 audio, and is NTSC @ 24000/1001 fps: mencoder -oac copy -ovc lavc -of mpeg -mpegopts format=dvd:tsaf:telecine \ -vf scale=720:480,harddup -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg2video:vrc_buf_size=1835:\ vrc_maxrate=9800:vbitrate=5000:keyint=15:vstrict=0:aspect=16/9 -ofps 24000/1001 \ -o movie.mpg movie.avi mencoder -oac lavc -ovc lavc -of mpeg -mpegopts format=xsvcd -vf \ scale=480:576,harddup -srate 44100 -af lavcresample=44100 -lavcopts \ vcodec=mpeg2video:mbd=2:keyint=15:vrc_buf_size=917:vrc_minrate=600:\ vbitrate=2500:vrc_maxrate=2500:acodec=mp2:abitrate=224:aspect=16/9 -ofps 25 \ -o movie.mpg movie.avi mencoder -oac lavc -ovc lavc -of mpeg -mpegopts format=xsvcd -vf \ scale=480:480,harddup -srate 44100 -af lavcresample=44100 -lavcopts \ vcodec=mpeg2video:mbd=2:keyint=18:vrc_buf_size=917:vrc_minrate=600:\ vbitrate=2500:vrc_maxrate=2500:acodec=mp2:abitrate=224:aspect=16/9 -ofps 30000/1001 \ -o movie.mpg movie.avi mencoder -oac lavc -ovc lavc -of mpeg -mpegopts format=xvcd -vf \ scale=352:288,harddup -srate 44100 -af lavcresample=44100 -lavcopts \ vcodec=mpeg1video:keyint=15:vrc_buf_size=327:vrc_minrate=1152:\ vbitrate=1152:vrc_maxrate=1152:acodec=mp2:abitrate=224:aspect=16/9 -ofps 25 \ -o movie.mpg movie.avi mencoder -oac lavc -ovc lavc -of mpeg -mpegopts format=xvcd -vf \ scale=352:240,harddup -srate 44100 -af lavcresample=44100 -lavcopts \ vcodec=mpeg1video:keyint=18:vrc_buf_size=327:vrc_minrate=1152:\ vbitrate=1152:vrc_maxrate=1152:acodec=mp2:abitrate=224:aspect=16/9 -ofps 30000/1001 \ -o movie.mpg movie.avi