[MPlayer-dev-eng] [RFC] change lacv's MPEG-4 encoding options defaults

[Guillaume Poirier]

Hi,
Rich Felker wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 28, 2005 at 02:48:45PM +0100, Guillaume Poirier wrote:

> This topic has come up in the past and I've flamed in the past.

Ok, now I understand why some (re-using your words, lame) MEncoder users
gave up using lavc (besides all its great quality) and turned to other
codecs.

It's really sad that when people come with ideas to make the majority of
people's life easier, it turns into flames.
That sounds like eletism to me.


> Defaults should always be all-off. If users are too lame to RTFM they
> should not hope to get a good encode.

I'll try to picture what you're saying with an example:
Let's say I buy a car. In my _real_ world, there's already an engine in
it that's tune for 'normal' mileage/speed. If I want to get a muscle
car, I'd work on the engine and tune it a bit. But in most cases, I just
trust the engineers who build the car that they have tuned it "fairly
well" and forget about it.
In your ideal world, someone who buys a car should expect its engine to
be completely untuned and should go through a big boring book to make it
usable.
I don't know about the others, but I prefer when I use an object that it
behaves in a sane way for most of the things I'm likely to be doing with it.

For what it's worth, other codeds supported by MEncoder (XviD and x264
at the very least) have defaults which are carefully chosen (by people
who know what they are talking about) to provide a good speed/quality
tradeoff, making them a _lot_ more user-friendly.
Users love that.

So the current situation is definitely not all off for all codecs.
The excuse that some options can't be turned off is a very bad excuse as
it can be added if needed.

Well, since I don't want to interfere with you, I'll just drop the case.

Guillaume