I've been trying to use mencoder to encode movies for Totem - a GNOME movie player based on Xine libs, but all the options I try won't work in Totem. I'm encoding standard DVD (MPEG 2?) streams. The only thing that works so far is mplayer dvd://1 -dumpstream, but since that doesn't compress the movie, it really eats up my harddrive space quickly. Has any one discovered a set of options that allows a compressed movie made in Linux to work in Totem/Xinelibs? Is transcode/ffmpeg maybe better suited to this situation? Thanks in advance.

this is not about "discovering" options to anything, you just need to use a divx encoder, instead of trying to somehow copy films using a video player... nothing to do with totem use mencoder. and of course, play them back with mplayer, not totem.

So do you mean to say that I can't encode with mencoder if I want to watch in Totem, and if I just have to use the divx encoder with mencoder, what audio encoder do I use with it? Could you have an example command maybe?

no i mean, mencoder is a divx encoder (among other outputs), and it's output will be playable on ANY divx player. Xine, Totem, Mplayer, AVIfile, BS-player, DivX-player, Windows Media Player... hundreds of them.

I also mean that Totem is pants, and you should use MPlayer anyway.

OK, I was trying to test mencoder with the following options:

mencoder dvd://1 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vpass=1:vbitrate=697 -oac mp3lame -lameopts br=3 -o movie.avi

Essentially the suggestion in the documentation. Should I instead do -ovc divx4 because when I tried the above it didn't seem to work. Also, do the file have to be completed in order to be played in other players. Because after only ten megabytes being encoded or so, it works in mplayer but not totem. The reason I want to use totem is that I set up many systems for friends, etc., and the gnome integration makes it considerably easier to use than MPlayer. And with the gstreamer backend, I'm thinking it will be significantly better than with xinelibs, as soon as Gstreamer gets it promised improvements in video support at least.

mabye my app would suit you best...

http://acidrip.sf.net

which uses mplayer

if you have correctly created a file, then it will work on any decent player. if it doesn't work on Totem, then blame totem... ANY decent divx player will play the output file fine.

Thanks. A GUI is certainly welcome here. Video encoding is quite a few steps away from my forte. :P

I'm using acid-rip, but everytime I try to rip, I get "Mencoder interrupted by user" with the line directly above reading "Option vop: doesn't exist" I already changed a line in your source to make it use the new dvd://N option instead of -dvd N. It wasn't detecting my version of MPlayer correctly I guess. How do I remove this vop option?

make sure you're using 0.11, 0.10 and below only work with mplayer 0.92 and below.


mind you you should be using 0.92 now though due to a security error in 1.0pre1...