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 |
| 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 |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
 Explore our comprehensive directory of recommended free and open source software. Our carefully curated collection spans every major software category.This directory is part of our ongoing series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. It features hundreds of detailed reviews, along with open source alternatives to proprietary solutions from major corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. You’ll also find interesting projects to try, hardware coverage, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Discovered a useful open source Linux program that we haven’t covered yet? Let us know by completing this form. |