Editing Making Movies (section)

===Mencoder/Mplayer===
[http://www.mplayerhq.hu Mplayer] is an award-winning open source movie player.  Mencoder (which comes packaged with Mplayer) is its movie encoder.  Mencoder can take in various file formats (png,gif,jpg) and convert them to movies.

Assuming you have created a lot of .png files and would like to encode a .mpeg, .avi or other video format, a number of solutions are known:
* The DiVX encoder using mplayer and mencoder? There's binaries for Unix and Windows. It makes rather nice compression on a 800x600 (probably higher). It doesn't take too long to produce the nicer quailty movies, but much longer than simply

 mencoder "mf://*.png" -mf type=png:fps=18 -ovc lavc -o output.avi

namely something like (this command worked BEST for my case; it's all one line connect it where the backslashes are).

 mencoder -mc 0 -noskip -skiplimit 0 -ovc lavc -lavcopts \
 vcodec=mpeg4:vhq:trell:mbd=2:vmax_b_frames=1:v4mv:vb_strategy=0:vlelim=0:vcelim=0:cmp=6:subcmp=6:precmp=6:predia=3:dia=3:vme=4:vqscale=1 \
 "mf://*.png" -mf type=png:fps=18 -o output.avi

The mpeg4 codec requires a DivX plugin which is not a part of the default installation on some operation systems. The codec msmpeg4v2 makes movies which are more likely to be playable on standard Windows players and can be used with mencoder e.g.
 
 mencoder -mc 0 -noskip -skiplimit 0 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=msmpeg4v2:vhq "mf://*.png" -mf type=png:fps=18 -o output.avi

This encoder line is however not optimised (yet), and the codec also produces a bit larger files than the mpeg4 at the same visual quality according to the Mplayer homepage.

====Troubleshooting====
#If your movie shows up in PowerPoint with only the first frame showing, or is just a black square, try adding '''-of asf''' or '''-of avi'''.
#If the above line complains about the '''codec''' part, then replace the word '''codec''' in the command line with '''vcodec'''.