Richard Bottoms <rbottoms@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> moved upon the face of the 'Net and spake thusly:
> Now that I have I have ffmpeg working with an ATI AIW VE under Red Hat 8.0
> I need to improve on it. The encoding quality is pretty poor.
>
> Can anyone tell me what is the very best Open Source codec to use with
> ffmpeg. And what is the command line sequence for selecting a specific codec.
The question is what codec can you afford (in terms of CPU cost),
given that you need real-time encoding?
If cpu usage is not an issue, "xvid" or "divx 5" are probably top of the pile.
I find that the standard mpeg-2 codec in ffmpeg does pretty well, /if/
you allow it to use a higher bitrate (therefore larger files).
Try encoding 5 minutes of TV at around 1, 1.5 and 2Mbit/s and compare the difference.
Varying the frame size makes a difference too.
eg.
# this is VCD PAL size and bitrate
ffmpeg -t 300 -b 1100 -ab 224 -s 352x288 foo.mpg
Change the -b and -s options for video bitrate and frame size
respectively.
Nobody's written a manual page for ffmpeg (dammit, I oughta just do it
myself), but there is a html manual of sorts in the source tarball,
and also the ouput of "ffmpeg -h".
--cjb
