[mythtv-users] Mencoder magic for Internal player

[Neil Dunbar]

All,

Not a question to burn any brainpower over, since I have a working solution 
anyway, but it might be nice to see if I can improve it.

Problem: I've got a fair number of Matroska rips from HD-DVD, transcoded via 
x264 down to 720p from 1080p. Since I've got a 720p LCD HDTV, leaving it in 
1080p is silly, to say nothing of a CPU-hog.

Now, I know that the MythVideo Internal player (version 0.20.2) doesn't really 
like Matroska that much. It plays, but fast forwarding and rewinding is a bit 
of a dead loss. So I transcode them into MPEG-2 files via mencoder - takes 
more space, but I can deal with that, and I can fast forward, remember 
position, all that stuff. Problem solved.

So now I thought I'd transcode to MPEG-4 (DX50) via mencoder to get smaller 
file sizes, while not beating up too much on the frontend CPU. The files play 
fine in mplayer, but when imported I sometimes get framedrops, and fast 
forwarding/rewind tends to be a bit of a disaster. Picture gets corrupted 
until the next keyframe, audio doesn't silence when FF goes past x3. Lots of 
people have described these problems - so nothing new here.

But since recordings transcoded via Mythtranscode into MPEG-4 play/rewind/fast 
forward just fine, there must be a set of parameters for mencoder/ffmpeg 
which will produce Internal-friendly files. Does anyone have experience that 
could bring to bear here?

I know I could also use Xine and Mplayer, but the integration of theme and 
control from the Internal player is just too nice (and has significant WAF 
correlation).

All ideas happily entertained,

Neil