I've been trying, unsuccessfully, for the last week to re-encode a set of videos. The source material is a set of VOB files ripped from a DVD. The output needs to be a scaled XviD. I suppose it doesn't *have* to be scaled, but it's for my kids so why waste the disk space when they won't know the difference?

The problem turned out to be the fact that I had multiple source files. Mencoder doesn't like to scale them for some reason. I'm sure it's a simple reason, and probably a reasonable one even. Something about the files could have difference sizes or something. I don't know and really I don't care. The solution was to squish all the files into one and then encode that one.

First, the squishing:

mencoder -ovc copy -oac copy file1.vob file2.vob file3.vob -o bigvobfile

Next, the encoding:

mencoder bigvobfile -o output.avi -oac mp3lame -ovc xvid -vf scale=480:352