That’s what I’ve been trying to do. You need to set a delay double of what’s mencoder’s setting, in the other direction (yes, it’s a hack, and mencoder sucks for not allowing to disable it’s “smart” automatic delay). The result is, you still get a file where audio and video don’t start at the same time. Not good. Of course, supporting mkv natively would make these unsafe hacks unnecessary.
you want no delay? use -mc 0 which completely disables MEncoder’s internal synchronization but be prepared to get sync issues more than without it
Whoah, a but touchy on the subject, are we?
I read that, and that behavior is not intended by the original specs. Also, check the doom9 forum, there’s lots of controversy on the subject.
The thing is, it’s not 100% defined. Which means, there are multiple ways to implement it. Which means I’m not going to use it because the tools may reject my file, or interpret it in a slightly different way, and they will be right.
Also, like you said, the other widely popular open-source program, VirtualDUB, does it differently. So, I’m not taking chances.
Yes, I’m a bit of touchy because it’s people like you who 1) have no idea on what they’re on about, 2) spread misinformation and 3) as others read it, they start to believe as many don’t take the time to check out correct sources, which in turn results in more spreading of misinformation and down the hill rolls the ball 
Also, it doesn’t have to be 100% defined. The point is that the specs themselves do not prohibit this and obviously, if one would want to implement this, one should do it the right way and not the “brain-dead” way like VDub & co
Plus, it doesn’t have chapters, and I like chapters. So, mkv it is. At least it’s 100% defined, and not extended by third-party people in slightly different ways.
It sounds like you’re trying to make this whole argument into AVI vs MKV thread, which this whole thread never was about. Yes, AVI doesn’t support many things and never was intended to in the first place so that’s why other containers exist. You can just as well use dvdxchaps to dump DVD chapters and import them into MKV, which I do in h264enc
So, one moment you’re saying mencoder is the mother of all encoders, and then - that it’s bad?
Well, yes, it is bad. No, I’m not going to fix it. I have better things to do than fixing broken (beyond repair) programs. Like contributing to Avidemux, for example. You know, the encoder that already is in the 21st century.
The program cannot be good in the future, what matters is how good it is now. Saying you can’t blame a program for not having something (because someone need to fix/rewrite it) is just silly.
Wait what??? 
Point out where I implied that mencoder is the mother of all encoders and is so good. Don’t put words I never said in my mouth, boy. If you have read the other thread of the OP, you would see yourself what I think about MEncoder and I’m not going to repeat it again. Fact is, for me mencoder has always done it’s job so there’s little reason to switch to something else. I might as well switch over to ffmpeg but don’t, mostly due to its lack of filters and direct DVD input. Also, I don’t like GUIs for encoding.
No, it is not silly. If one wants something, one should implement it. But since no one does want to do that but only moan how bad mencoder is and what it is missing, of course at present time it’ll lack much. What do you think? That you can just sit on your butt and mencoder will magically implement itself the stuff users want?
