[MPlayer-dev-eng] 3 pass encoding syntax poll

[Trent Piepho]

On Fri, 11 Feb 2005, Andreu Escudero wrote:
> > The man page doesn't look that clear to me.  It says "three pass" four times,
> > but also says "Nth pass", so which is it, three passes or N passes?  If it's N
> > pass, what are the allowable values of N, other than three?  Three or more?
> > One or more?  If N can be two, is there any difference between N pass with two
> > passes and "two pass" mode?  If there is not, then what is the point of two
> > pass mode?
> 
> >From the man:
> 3	Nth pass (second and third passes of three pass encoding)
> 
> it's not difficult to interpret it as, for example:
> 3       Nth pass (second, third and fourth passes of four pass encoding).

The man page never mentions four pass encoding and never refers to a pass
beyond the third.  There is no way you could know, from the man page, that
three pass actually means two or more passes.

> perhaps the reasonable thing to do is change the manual to something like:
> 3       Nth pass (2 .. N passes of N pass encoding)

How about:
  1	First pass of multi-pass encoding
  3	Subsequent passes (2nd and up) of multi-pass encoding

Or:
  1	Create a mutli-pass log file, but do not read one
  2     Read a multi-pass log file, but do not write a new one
  3     Read a multi-pass log file, and over-write it with a new one

> so the only point of two pass mode is removing the necessity to back
> up the log file, because it gets overwriten using N pass mode (or

Sure would be simpler if three pass aka N pass mode didn't overwrite the log
file, as then the artificial three pass vs two pass mode thing could be
eliminated.