[mythtv-users] transcoding perfect dvd rips to xvid

[David Brodbeck]

Mike Schiller wrote:
> I've got a bunch of .vob files that I've created by importing DVDs
> using the 'perfect' setting (some are stereo, some are 6.1) .  At this
> point, they are taking up too much space, and I'd like to transcode
> them to good quality xvid with ac3 audio.  Unfortunately, I'm a bit
> confused by the myriad of options available on ffmpeg's command line.
> Could someone provide me with the command line to do this at a good
> quality?
>   

I realize this isn't an ffmpeg solution, but here's a really
straightforward way to do transcoding to two-pass MPEG4 with mencoder:
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/menc-feat-mpeg4.html

The nice thing about this is it works for any input format mplayer can
play.  I've used this in the past for transcoding MPEG2 recordings to
MPEG4 for archiving.  (Until recently my only backend was a 1 GHz
miniITX system, and I preferred to do transcoding on my faster desktop
machine.)  I wrapped up the two command lines in a script to make it easier.