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

[Diego Biurrun]

Trent Piepho writes:
> 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.

The MEncoder parts of the man page are less clear for the simple
reason that I do not encode and thus cannot improve their clarity.
Patches or even informal suggestions for improvements are more than
welcome.

> > > 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.

Sounds good to me.

Diego