Bit of a long multiple question but if anyone could help I'm a little confused, and quite a newbie at using Mencoder.

Ok, I ripped an original dvd movie and encoded it with Xvid with this command :

mencoder dvd://1 -o rebel.avi -ovc xvid -xvidencopts bitrate=1000 -oac mp3lame -lameopts mode=1:cbr:br=64 -mc 0

It turned out at approx 800mb I played it back using Mplayer and everything was fine.

I then burned 20mb of the file to a cd-rw disc just to try it on my home dvd player (it plays any disc) and the picture was stretched vertically and I didnt have any sound. I then ran Mplayer with -v switch and noticed that Mplayer was de-coding the sound with the mp3lame libraries. It was suggested to me on irc that my home dvd player couldnt de-code the audio because it wouldnt have the mp3lame libraries.

I am a little confused about this suggestion because I have encoded lots of music cd's to mp3 using lame and they play back just fine on the same home dvd player.

If the home dvd player can read and play my mp3 files from disc why can it not play the sound from the movie that was encoded with lame also ?

Am I missing something obvious here ?

Any suggestions on why the movie is stretched vertically ? (something to do with aspect ratio i'm guessing but I just cant figure that stuff out).



I then ripped part of another dvd movie using the command:

mencoder dvd://5 -aid 129 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=1500:vhq -oac lavc -o it.avi -endpos 40mb

This plays back on the home dvd player perfectly with the correct sound (so maybe the suggestion on mp3lame libraries is correct ?), and the picture isn't stretched vertically
but the sound is very low, Is there a way I can increase the sound at encoding time ? Ive tried -vol 9 but that doesn't make any difference.

So just to summarize 'cause I know I'm asking multiple questions here and perhaps seems a bit choppy

-oac mp3lame, plays fine on pc but no sound on home dvd player.
-oac lavc plays fine on home dvd player but is very low.

Also the first movie is stretched vertically but the second (different) movie is not.

Took me ages to get this far just pieced together lots info' and I cant seem to get any further, the more I read the MAN pager on mencoder the confused I become

Anybody here who can point me in the right direction ?

Many Thanks.