[MPlayer-users] Choosing the size of a divx to be encoded

[GianCarlo De Pol]

This is meant to be a user-to-user question... I do not mean to bug the
develpers.I have been playing with Mencoder for a while; I have ripped a
fw dvd's, with some different divx4opts, just to experiment  a bit.Now I
see that I can reliably decide the final zize, in 2-pass encoding, with
the br=xxx (and some arithmetics to find xxx).My question is, What is
the ideal size to encode ? If I encdode at the dvd full size, the
playback seems to be very heavy for Mplayer; indeed, it manages to
playback, but not to postprocess, -pp 1 already gets audio out of sync,
and from -pp 2 up it tells me that my sysem (PIII 850) is too slow.There
is on the other side not much to postprocess: I can see no perceptible
blocking (except in the fastest scenes), and the ringing is hardly
noticeable.(There is the strange "interlace-like thing" , in fast
sequences, mentioned in the dvd doc page, but this will be dealt with in
future as we know).On the other hand,  I can 2-pass encode at a smaller
size. Then the playback seems easier, and postprocessing can be done,
but obviously there is the larger scaling factor to be taken into
account.So I would like to ask... supposing that the br=xxx is fixed (to
make a cd e.g.) and that anyway playback will be -fs, is there a rule of
thumb to decide the best size to encode ?
Thanks, Rettilone