Mencoder commandline for ~good quality .vob files?

[shevegen]

Hi. I have several 4.3 Gig video files on DVDs. Some even smaller, with around 3.9 gigs.


I currently use mencoder, two pass encoding.

mencoder
-ovc xvid
-oac mp3lame
-xvidencopts autoaspect:pass=2:bitrate=1300:chroma_me:me_quality=6 -aid 128 -o output.avi
input.vob


You see I specify a bitrate. But I dont know which bitrate to set.
Is this too hight? With this bitrate, the resulting avi files are around 1 gig in size, which i find a bit too big.
I aim to have a quality of around 90-95%, but at best at a file size of less than 1 gig.

[Hellworm]

If you do not want specific size why don't you use a constant quant?
Also you may want to test x264, also available from mencoder.

[shevegen]

Never used x264 so far, any advantages over xvid? What would the commandline be for an example .vob file
to x264? And would the 4.3 gig vob data go below 1 gig easily with an at least equal quality compared to an xvid avi?

[Hellworm]

command would be something like:
-ovc x264 -x264encopts crf=17:bframes=3:qcomp=1.0

This is a very simple setup, I'm not sure how the quality is compared to xvid with this. However with a (much) slower setup the quality will easily be better than xvid:

-ovc x264 -x264encopts
crf=17:bframes=3:frameref=3:qcomp=1.0:p_pyramid:nodeblock:weight_b:4x4mv:8x8dct:me=3:subq=6:mixed_refs:brdo:bime:trellis=2

I'm not completely sure of the crf=17. I think this is about equal to xvid quant 2, but I normally work with bitrate.
For more details refer to the mplayer man page, it contains good descriptions of the switches. Also test for yourself ;).
Btw: entering "man:/mplayer" in konqueror gives you a nicely formatted man page with all of konquerors browser abilities.

edit: typo

[shevegen]

Thanks, I'll have a look at it and compare this over the weekend.