Problem solved. It was just a stupid mencoder-alias in the shell-startup which has overwritten the current command, so i always executed the old binary in another path. *DOH*

anyway, thanks to CISC for hitting my head against the wall which has finaly unclouded my mind about this problem... just a few hours more and I had required a visit in the mental hospital.

example for good 3-pass encoding (DVD -> MPEG-4 (divx))

(if you don't know what's 3-pass or 2-pass encoding then read the encoding.html which comes in the mencoder archive)


1st pass:
mencoder -dvd 1 -dvd-device ide.device:2 -ovc frameno -oac mp3lame -lameopts vbr=3:br=128 -o frameno.avi

2nd pass:
mencoder -dvd 1 -dvd-device ide.device:2 -oac copy -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vpass=1:vqscale=4:mbd=2 -o finalmovie.avi

3rd pass:
mencoder -dvd 1 -dvd-device ide.device:2 -oac copy -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vpass=2:vqscale=4:mbd=2 -o finalmovie.avi


Change the quality if the video by changing the vqscale argument (2 has better quality, but also creates bigger file; 4 is probably the optimal value for the most cases)

Dunno if the command line is perfect (it created here a test.avi instead of a finalmovie.avi . But the result was very okay, IMHO.

hope this info will be useful for someone out there.