need help transcoding hd-dvd rip with mplayer

[SpaceBass]

hey folks,
I've done some searchers but perhaps my terms were not spot on.

I've been at this, off and on, for some time. Today I've had the most luck yet :)
the latest SVN of mplayer and the eac3 patch compile cleanly on my OSX clients and (headless) linux server. The Mac clients can actually play the video and audio from a ripped HD-DVD (although I appear to be getting the spanish audio track). The video is choppy, but suspect thats a hardware issue on the playback side.

I'd like to transcode the rip into a file that plays more smoothly with 5.1 surround. Since Mplay is playing the .EVO file, is it reasonable to assume it can transcode them too? H.264 would seem the most appropriate format, but I'm not set on it.

If that is the case, does anyone have any insight into the command line that I'll need? What about tutorials?

Thanks in advance!
-N

[nm]

I've been at this, off and on, for some time. Today I've had the most luck yet :)
the latest SVN of mplayer and the eac3 patch compile cleanly on my OSX clients and (headless) linux server. The Mac clients can actually play the video and audio from a ripped HD-DVD (although I appear to be getting the spanish audio track).
Try -aid to select the correct audio track. To see all available tracks, look at the output of mplayer -v.

The video is choppy, but suspect thats a hardware issue on the playback side.
Or a settings issue. What kind of hardware do you have and what is the video like (H.264, VC-1 or MPEG-2, what bitrate)? If you have a dualcore CPU and it's H.264 video, try -lavdopts threads=2. You could also skip deblocking partially or completely at the expense of output quality: -lavdopts fast:skiploopfilter=nonref. Video output driver (-vo) and its parameters may also have a great effect.

I'd like to transcode the rip into a file that plays more smoothly with 5.1 surround. Since Mplay is playing the .EVO file, is it reasonable to assume it can transcode them too?
Yes, MEncoder can transcode if MPlayer can play.

H.264 would seem the most appropriate format, but I'm not set on it.
H.264 is quite heavy to decode compared to MPEG-4 ASP (XviD, DivX), but it is also more efficient (10-50 %, depending on the video and bitrate). So the question is, how fast are your decoding machines, and how do you value the storage space?

If that is the case, does anyone have any insight into the command line that I'll need? What about tutorials?
Search for x264 encoding with MEncoder. It has been discussed many many times on this forum and elsewhere.

For a tutorial, see MPlayer/MEncoder HTML documentation (http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/index.html) (chapters 13 and 14)

[microchip8]

try h264enc - http://h264enc.sourceforge.net

[SpaceBass]

thanks NM and Froggy!
I've been playing with h264enc but apparently my compile of mplayer is missing something critical...

back in a few with a more detailed response