[Novalug] Linux/MythTV/mencoder

[Kevin Kitts]

Hi All,
  I've been playing around with Linux based TV recording application called
MythDora 4 - based on Fedora Core. I have some TV shows recorded - and
thought it would be fun to "transcode" them into a format suitable for
playback on a Nokia 770. I found an interesting perl script here that does a
lot of what I think I'd want (
http://www.tux.org/~peterw/linux/pdatranscode.pl.txt ) - but I'd like to
better understand one of the programs that it invokes called "mencoder".

For example, there is 1 program I recorded using MythTV that seemed to be in
4:3 format - and yet it had black bands at the top and bottom. I used a
program (MediaConverter - which behind the scenes invokes mencoder) from
here (
http://maemo.org/community/wiki/VideoEncoding#bfc093ef8e4f558eae8f0454bb7801ab)
to attempt to crop off the top and bottom - but it made everyone tall
and
skinny! Also - chopped off the tops of people heads in addition to the black
bands that were at the top and bottom of the screen. Using a different
option of the program (not cropping) - leaves big black bands on the left
and right of the screen.

I guess I'd like to better understand mencoder "scale" options and how they
change the aspect ratio of different source recordings - and how to adjust
the amount of "cropping". Of course - one would prefer *not* to change the
aspect ratio. I'm not sure if this has anything to do with "anamorphic"
recordings or not. The show I recorded was just a normal analog cable show -
not a DVD movie or anything.

Anyway... any pointers for additional reading on these topics would be most
apprec.

Kevin
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