Last Updated on April 22, 2026
Mencoder is a simple movie encoder, designed to encode MPlayer-playable movies (AVI/ASF/OGG/DVD/VCD/VOB/MPG/MOV/VIV/FLI/RM/NUV/NET) to other MPlayer-playable formats. It can encode with various codecs, like DivX4 (1 or 2 passes), libavcodec, PCM/MP3/VBRMP3 audio.
It also has stream copying and video resizing abilities.
Since it uses the same code as MPlayer, it also features the same huge number of highly-configurable video and audio filters to transform the video and audio stream.
Mencoder does not come with a graphical interface, and therefore some users may also want to use a graphical frontend.
Key Features
- Wide support for Video and audio codecs:
- Video:
- MPEG-1 (VCD) and MPEG-2 (SVCD/DVD/DVB) video.
- MPEG-4 ASP in all variants including DivX ;-), OpenDivX (DivX4), DivX 5 (Pro), Xvid.
- MPEG-4 AVC aka H.264.
- Windows Media Video 7/8 (WMV1/2).
- Windows Media Video 9 (WMV3) (using x86 DLL).
- RealVideo 1.0, 2.0 (G2).
- RealVideo 3.0 (RP8), 4.0 (RP9) (using Real libraries).
- Sorenson v1/v3 (SVQ1/SVQ3), Cinepak, RPZA and other QuickTime codecs.
- DV video.
- 3ivx.
- Intel Indeo3 (3.1, 3.2).
- Intel Indeo 4.1 and 5.0 (using x86 DLL or XAnim codecs).
- VIVO 1.0, 2.0, I263 and other H.263(+) variants (using x86 DLL).
- MJPEG, AVID, VCR2, ASV2 and other hardware formats.
- FLI/FLC.
- HuffYUV.
- various old simple RLE-like formats.
- Audio:
- MPEG layer 1, 2, and 3 (MP3) audio.
- AC3/A52 (Dolby Digital) audio (software or SP/DIF).
- AAC (MPEG-4 audio).
- WMA (DivX Audio) v1, v2.
- WMA 9 (WMAv3), Voxware audio, ACELP.net etc (using x86 DLLs).
- RealAudio: COOK, SIPRO, ATRAC3 (using Real libraries).
- RealAudio: DNET and older codecs.
- QuickTime: Qclp, Q-Design QDMC/QDM2, MACE 3/6 (using QT libraries), ALAC.
- Ogg Vorbis audio.
- VIVO audio (g723, Vivo Siren) (using x86 DLL).
- alaw/ulaw, (ms)gsm, pcm, *adpcm and other simple old audio formats.
- Video:
- Stream copying.
- Powerful filter system (crop, expand, flip, postprocess, rotate, scale, noise, RGB/YUV conversion).
Website: www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/news.html
Support:
Developer: Sergio Costas
License: GNU General Public License v3.0
Mencoder is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Video Converters | |
|---|---|
| HandBrake | Multithreaded cross-platform media transcoding application |
| FFmpeg | Multimedia player, server and encoder |
| Shutter Encoder | Graphical frontend to FFmpeg with editing features |
| FastFlix | GUI for H.264, HEVC and AV1 hardware and software encoding |
| Videomass | Cross-platform GUI for FFmpeg and youtube-dl |
| avconv | Part of libav-tools; fork of FFmpeg |
| VLC | Vdeo player which also converts multimedia to different formats |
| mpv | Cross-platform media player with video encoding support |
| ab-av1 | AV1 encoder with automatic quality selection through sample testing |
| MEncoder | MEncoder is included in MPlayer |
| FFQueue | Graphical frontend to FFmpeg written in C++ |
| Edconv | User-friendly FFmpeg GUI |
| transcode | Utility to encode raw video/audio streams |
| OmniGet | Uses FFmpeg to perform the video conversion |
| MystiQ | GUI for FFmpeg, a powerful media converter |
| Frame | Desktop media conversion utility |
| ffdash | VP9 video encoder |
| Constrict | Compress videos to target sizes |
| Leonardo | Media conversion application |
| Ciano | Easy way to convert your multimedia files to the most popular formats |
| Recoder | GTK4 video transcoding application |
| VidCom | Simple utility for video archiving and compression |
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