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

[Trent Piepho]

On Fri, 11 Feb 2005, Andreu Escudero wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> For me, Nth pass means, exactly, Nth pass, where N can be 2, 3 or 768
> if you want...

That's because you already know what it does.  The man page says "three pass"
over and over again.  It never says "two or more" and it never says the third
pass is optional.  I doubt anyone who did not know how multi-pass encoding
worked would come to the conclusion that "three pass" actually means two or
more.

> Better:
> 1       First pass of multi-pass encoding
> 2       ALERT - Only for 2 pass encodings
>          Second pass of 2 pass encoding

You could use vpass=2 for the final pass on a 42 pass encoding, could you not?

> > 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.
> I disagree here, because the only way to do that is to create
> different logfiles for each pass, that means leaving a lot of garbage
> in your filesystem, and breaking compatibility for all scripts that

Read in divx2pass.log and write out divx2pass.new, when encoding completes
without error, move divx2pass.new over to divx2pass.log.  No build up of
files, and you don't lose all your work if the encoding aborts for some
reason.  Shouldn't break any scripts.