XVID Quality difference Transcode vs. Mencoder

[davidjneff]

I have been playing with acidrip and dvdrip. Acidrip made a shell script that runs mencoder (had a slight error though oddly, maybe I accidentally left a space in a box). dvdrip uses transcode.

First, I ran some merged vobs through mencoder with its CLI, and was quite happy with the results. I then started using DVDrip and when it was done the quality of the XVID was clearly worse than what mencoder gave. Same bit rate and frame size, just simple lb deinterlace on both, 2 pass (although I question if DVDrip/transcoder really maybe did 2 pass).

DVDrip is pretty slick and easy, but anyone else run into quality differences between Mencoder and Transcode? Running the latest stable packages and libraries on 2 different Gentoo machines, with same results. I've done side by side compares, just left all the XVID settings to their defaults.