
i have looked it up, but on forums and google i seem to be only one with this problem (totally unrelated question below, please read both)

I have been using linux 5 years, I have used a em8000 dxr3+ hard for a long time, no problems making it work in mplayer, xine or anything else (in fact even with my problem it still kinda works.) my problem is not making things recognise the card, nor is it a greenscreen/module option problem, I worked those out a year or 2 ago and have always had it work fine. I recently upgraded to kernel 2.6.0 (I know it is beta) and used the 2.5.x dxr3 kernel patch.. no problems everything compiled fine.
I used my same settings as before and everything loaded. then I went to play the video.. it was black and white... I then tried another player.. same. I then tried the colorbars module option (card constantly displays colored bars) still black and white... tried new tv and cable. still black and white.. tried seperate compile modules... failed to compile cause 2.6 kernel. tried every module option they have.. no success.. spoke to developers, they asked me a few questions then we had a few messages and nothing was resolved, now they are ignoring me (didn't not chatter, just gave info they wanted total of 4 messages from beginnignt o end a hell of a lot shorter than this message here :-P) has anyone had this happen and has anyone fixed, and has anyone else got any ideas?
Question that is unrelated
I have used mencoder a lot to encode videos from dvd (legally) and tv. I want to know some good quality/size flags though. I want to be able to make them be 20min long at 720x480 and look nice and crisp all in 200mb. I knwo it is possible because I have a coupel hundred video files iek that (you can get a good example at
www.fangirlfriday.com d-loading fansubed (legal) inuyasha episodes. I am not a newbie and yo do not have to walk me through it, I am sure it is 2-pass encoding with lavc, need other flags to use though.