h264enc for Linux

[rberger]

Originally Posted by nm

MEncoder calls libx264's parameter parsing code, so all parameters are always supported and the syntax is basically the same as in x264.

It even seems to be *exactly* the same up to a few parameters where mencoder has it's own version or plain wouldn't allow the x286 parameter because it could interfere with mencoders own operation, like -passfile for --stats or --progress leading to premature exit since it would mess with mencoders output.

Apart from those few, x264 parameters seem to be handed down by mencoder untouched. The reason they may have different names in the mencoder docs is because some options are implemented with several names in x264 itself, like --filter being the same as --deblock. Apparently, you can always look into common/common.c in the x264 source tree to find out what is what.

Only x264 features that are not supported are the GTK+ GUI and Matroska and MP4 output since that part is handled by MEncoder.

Seems to me all those were never part of x264 proper. It's just an encoder library with a CLI.

However, MP4 output should work with libavformat's muxer (-of lavf -lavfopts format=mp4).

I wouldn't recommend that. As of SVN-r26492, mencoder's MP4 muxing is once again - and likely always has been - broken. It even warns about that.

There's always the possibility to encode video and audio separately with mencoder and mux with gpac/mp4box. This generally works pretty well with PAL sources, but the moment you do IVTC on NTSC material or other frame juggling filtering, you might run into A/V sync problems. In these cases, it really matters what options you feed to mencoder, and it becomes a kind of a trial and error situation.

See e.g. sections 14.1.9 and 14.1.12.1 here:
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en...dvd-mpeg4.html

and how people already have run into sync troubles
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=122018
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.v...yer.user/48954
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.v...yer.user/49206

That's one of the reasons encoding on Linux still sucks, that while mencoder seems to be the most advanced full feature transcoding frontend (transcode being another) and often enough working quite well right out of the box, it might always unexpectedly fail in some only slightly subtle situation. MP4 muxing definitely seems to be one of those.