On Tue, 2005-06-28 at 16:13 +0200, Christian Bodenstedt wrote:

> one-pass encoding the results are great. However, MPlayers manpage
> recommends using multipass with h264, but transcode does not seem to
> support it. Using "-R 1" results in an empty file "divx4.log" which causes
> transcode to stop when "-R 2" is used (commands and output: see
> attachment).

AFAIK even ffmpeg does not support multipass h264 (libavcodec).

> Also I don't have a clue how to use additional passes with
> the "-R" swich, since "-R 3" already means "const quantisizer". 

Don't expect miracles from multipass, especially not from the third and
higher passes.

> Maybe it's an option in the mysterious "ffmpeg.cfg" file, but I didn't
> find the right one. BTW it would be very nice, if a sample config file,
> at least naming all possible options, was shipped with transcode. Erik?
> 

All possible options can be easily found in the file export/ffmpeg_cfg.c

> | To see all supported options, have a look at the output of 'transcode -y
> | ffmpeg -F mpeg4 -q2'
> 
> I replaced "-F mpeg4" with "-F h264" which resulted in "picture size
> invalid". Well, this can be "fixed" with "-g 32x32", but I don't think
> this solution would be obvious to a first time user.

There is no difference between valid options (from transcode's point of
view) for whatever codec. So -F mpeg4 works equally well as -F h264 for
this purpose.

> Also at the end of "export_ffmpeg.txt" there are two example commandlines.
> No bad idea, but they are for mencoder...

Probably 

The ffmpeg support in transcode is completely ripped from mplayer, so
you might expect these things.

So no you also know where to find the description of the options...