I've been encoding and transcoding via cli for three days now, and having good success. My standard cli statement is pretty much the same as I mentioned above, except I use 480:360 over 400:240 since that works better for me (in terms of bitrate mostly; 650 bitrate just works best imo). I'm still looking for ways to control bitrate, which is the reason I went off on the cli thing from the standard converters mentioned on that wiki page. If you use that command mentioned above, your bitrate won't be 800; that's a work-in-progress atm, but the converters on the wiki page don't come much closer than I have as of yet, so I think video bitrate is not something you can have tight control over; at least not as tight as audio bitrate.

To remove black letterbox bars with cli, the suggestion on this page worked perfectly for me yesterday:

http://www.axllent.org/docs/video/mencoder_dvd_to_mpeg4

Scroll down to: "Console Commands Here are the three commends I used..." topmost box for the mencoder letterbox crop numbers command, then plug in the numbers you get after running it into a part of the video where you're sure the letterbox bars are showing. This section also gives you an idea on how to do the two-pass run efficiently, as well as how to raise the volume level and other stuff.

http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/HOWTO...oduction_Guide

...was helpful but most of it was obvious by the time I found that page. A good starting point though.

http://quadpoint.org/projects/simplerip

...was somewhat helpful, too. Not in terms of the calculator but from other stuff and links on the page.



As mentioned in the following thread, I'm looking into how to (cli) transcode audio at 44.1kHz instead of 48kHz, (post #8), since it's well known that 48kHz audio gives a performance hit, as well as the bitrate cap mentioned by atilla77 (post #17).

http://www.internettablettalk.com/fo...ad.php?t=27496

Any further cli information you can suggest would be welcome.


Joe.