[Xvid-devel] Full review of the help message

[Elio Blanca]

Hi Michael,
about the -zones option I think the issue cannot be complexity. After all, we can assume that users 
using xvid_encraw for their encodings are not newbies for sure  :-)
Google helped me in finding this help text:
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=920163#post920163
which seems quite useful; I will try PMing the user "Brother John" in order to ask him for his text 
usage.
On the other side, I really like xvid_encraw: it's light and quite complete, but lack of full 
control about the zone options keeps it from being a full replacement for the vfw filter (which, in 
contrast, shows all available options).
Well, I think that having xvid_encraw option-complete will make it a suitable, full and native 
encoder for everyone (at no cost! It ships with xvid source tree).
Elio



Il 11/02/2014 16:03, Michael Militzer ha scritto:
> Hi Elio,
>
> thanks, it's a nice patch. Reviewed and applied.
>
> I think the reason why there's no help text for the -zones option is simply
> that it's a complex option, hard to use and not easy to find a good help
> text for. The documented way of creating zones is using the -z[qw] option.
>
> Best regards,
> Michael
>
>
> Quoting Elio Blanca <eblanca76 at users.sourceforge.net>:
>
>>
>> This patch includes a full review of the usage text, which now prints
>> the actual value for any option, with some trick.
>> For example, you say you want to compress your videos using always a
>> max keyframe interval of 150 instead of 300. Well, you can change the
>> default value, type `make' and xvid_encraw will always use 150 as max
>> keyframe interval from now on (you don't need to type it every time),
>> and it DOES print this value in the help message! So you know which
>> value you are using, even if you don't ever type it on the command line.
>> The further trick is tied to on/off options.
>> You say you always want to use the `packed bitstream' option but typing
>> the option is boring. So, again, you can change the default value (set
>> it to 1) and run `make' and the shiny new xvid_encraw will always
>> enable the packed_bitstream feature by default. At that point, the help
>> message won't ever print the option needed for ACTIVATING that feature,
>> because it is always enabled; instead, it will say you how to DISABLE
>> it. Try disabling the same feature (set the value to 0), run make, and
>> then the help message will say you how to ENABLE it.
>> I think this may help keeping the usage message short yet useful.
>>
>> There's a new issue I will investigate next time.
>> I see the code is able to parse a `-zones' option structured  as
>> framenumber,type,weight,options/framenumber,type,weight,options/...
>> but - well - I didn't see the whole stuff deep enough.
>> The actual help message doesn't tell anything about this, why?
>> Is this feature about to be removed?
>> Isn't it fully tested?
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Xvid-devel mailing list
> Xvid-devel at xvid.org
> http://list.xvid.org/mailman/listinfo/xvid-devel
>