Mencoder. Trying to enocde DVD-Compliant Mpeg-2.

Hello, thanks in advance for any help anyone can give me. I have got: Windows XP Pro SP1 and all Windows updates (except SP2) Pentium 3 1.1 gig half gig of ram 120 GB hard drive space using NTFS I had a wedding video on camcorder which I wanted to capture losslessly onto my computer and then put it onto a DVD-r I read around a lot, then I captured it using HuffYuv at 768x576 which I thought was 'full pal' to capture all the detail, so I now have it as a 35.3 GB AVI file. It lasts 1 hour 5 minutes. It has audio too but I am happy to demux that and upsample it to 48000 hz using SSRC, Then remux. It's going to be quite important for the person who will have this DVD to want to pause it at any Frame, and preserving as closely as reasonably possible the picture quality of the original tape. I had been reading up and trying Mencoder for weeks! I have got it so the quality of the picture (pausing at different frames too)is all I could want, but the program just will not respect the maximum bitrate! I would be quite happy to do a CBR encode but that also does not seem possible as far as I have experienced. I have read through the man_page.html over and over, I have tried so many different combinations of switches! :( I do not want to use B-Frames, and I want the bitrate to be around 7200, I do not use Noise Reduction nor any picture quality filters. I resize to 720x576, I also have a problem with making sure the aspect is seen as '4:3' on the encoded files. Media Player Classic always plays the files though the aspect looks too square at 100% zoom, and too widescreen if I double the size, though the picture looks fine. Muxing or Multi-plexing or whatever it's called in different programs warns me of the exceeded bitrate, or I get an incorrect aspect warning. Here is a latest script that also doesn't work (bitrate spikes) C:\asblah\mplayer100105P3CD\mencoder.exe -vc huffyuv -aspect 1.3333 -nosound -vf format=yuy2,scale=720:576:0:0:0.00:0.50,dsize=4/3,harddup -sws 2 -noskip -of rawvideo -ofps 25 -ovc lavc -skiplimit 0 -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg2video:vme=0:mbd=2:keyint=0:sc_threshold=1000000:vrc_eq=1:vrc_init_cplx=1000:vbitrate=7200:vratetol=1100:vrc_maxrate=8000:vrc_buf_size=1835:vfdct=2:idct=3:nr=0:p_mask=1.0:dc=11 d:\capvid\matwed1min53.avi -o d:\capvid\mtwd I have tried 3 different recent compiles of mplayer bundle, including Celtic Druids' , I have tried different rate control methods 'vrc_eq=' , I have recent FFDshow compile installed and it doesn't seem to make a difference if I use that for decoding Huffyuv rather than force proper HuffYuv with '-vc huffyuv'. I have tried & tried so many different things, but is it possible to produce a DVD compliant Mpeg2 encode at around 7200? Is it possible to force a CBR encode?, I suppose I don't mind whether I do a 1 pass or 2 pass. Is there also a program somewhere that can tell the colour of a file (I mean like whether it's YV12, YUY2 .....)? An error I always get while encoding is lots of rc buffer underflowmin scrolling down the Dos window THANKYOU for any help, I've got a real headache here. Quenc encodes including todays 0.59b also exceed bitrate. AviDemux latest 2036 gives me invalid files on DVD mpeg 2 encodes. I'm really stuck on this!

I have tried to produce DVD-Compliant streams with mencoder under linux and run into the same problems. I would reccomend you try Peter Cheat's modified mencoder located at . It should respect minimum/maximum bitrate.

For avidemux2, try settings the output to mpegV and use DVD as codec That way you will have video only Ditto for audio, mux using mplex and you wil have a 100% DVD compliant at the end. The only know drawback is DVD codec (based on mpeg2enc) is slow.

Mean: , I just get the same thing when I try encoding to DVD or DVD (lavc) It gives me files that are huge (like almost as big as the Huffyuv input clip), and that cannot be rendered or muxed. Gspot cannot identify them either. This is using the latest version. 2036 Evade: I am slowly getting the Peter Cheat Mencoder and will give it a try. Thanks guys both for suggestions. I think there is definitly a rate control issue that is the only thing spoiling this Mpeg2 encoding , because the results themselves look very good, I just cant get something I can put on DVD (yet!) I will not give up on this tho' :)

Did you press the vprocess button ?

OMG! That worked Mean, thankyou thankyou thankyou!!! :) :) I had pressed it before but no menu popped up and so I had just thought I shouldn't have pressed it :D Now I know! The resulting m2v is great, it plays nicely and I am able to mux it (with Peter Cheats mplex 2) with NO errors, the bit-rate is within the limits I set and Gspot identifies it and with the correct DAR 4:3 !! Everything is fine now thanks to you Mean after I had tried so many things. You are wonderful, thanks again :thanks:

I had got Peter Cheats' modified mencoder and tried it using an 80 second test clip of my Huffyuv avi. I tried lots of different settings and got it so that it would give me both a DVD compliant m2v (mpeg2) and so that I was very pleased with the quality! But when I set it up for the full clip (1 hour 5 minutes 35.3 GBs) it would only encode the first approx 100 seconds of it! It was incredibly frustrating to have got so far then to be stuck at another obstacle! I tried different things with the -endpos switch using the time and the mb options but same thing. Then after thinking some more I realised it could be the openDML AVI of greater than 2GBs or 1GBs or whatever the limit is. So I then searched and got a version of mencoder with avs support from here as I can only think of avisynth of being a way to get round the limit (don't know how else to tell mencoder to accept an avi bigger than 2gbs?) I am trying it now but it has a long time to go! I think it will probably have the rate control problems though as it's just built on cvs 17-01-2005 ....... I wonder if there is a version of mencoder that both has rate control fixes and will accept an avs?

Peter Cheat's Nuenc is based on the same libavcodec with his new rate control and will accept avs. Different commandline than Mencoder though.

To use avs files with Mencoder, I use akupenguin's AVS2YUV: It's designed for Linux use with Wine, but it works fine under Windows. Use command line: avs2yuv "z:\blah.avs" -

Little update: I have just read that my DC value of 11 would not be compliant for DVD, values of 8, 9 or 10 are. I am learning stuff all the time! I hope mencoder documentation will have some more lines of text added to it; it would just be a nice thing to have some hints and brief explanations for the user, regarding the settings and values. Just a few extra lines and examples make the world of difference to the user when reading the usage documentation! I will be getting back to trying mencoder with AVS input as in Bogalvators' post, but my PC is quite slow and I am giving mencoder a break and trying other mpeg2 encoders, I hope there might be an update from Peter Cheat with the rate control which would probably be the crucial thing to get an DVD compliant m2v out.