i will be adding that one to my list, the one thing i dont like about using mplayer in a looping script is that you have no control over cropping, this looks like it is simmilar to virtual dub where you can set the settings for each file and pass by hand and delay it as a batch job for latter (THE major selling point for virtual dub IMHO)
if you can always remove the black bars on video streams, it helps compression, even if its only a pixel or two or is just a tinting towards the edge of the screen, as any sudden change in color affects bitrates, plus it makes things look alot nicer
if it dosent fit the asspect ratio of the Z's screen then let your movie player put the black bars back in software, its faster and you get a better image
note: i used to hand encode everything by fiddling with the render options (even between passes, you can get a good speed up by dropping stuff you dont need to do in the first pass), cropping and manual insertion of i-frames instead of letting the software place them every X frames (huge comperssion savings if you know what you are doing)
also note huge speedups gan be gained with virtual dub if you change the order you apply filters, de-telicline should always bee done on first in my opinion but fiddling with filtering before and after you do a resize and rotate can GREATLY effect quality and encode speed
