General question: best practices to create/generate a preview

[nickman00]

Hello All,

I'm just wondering what are your customs and practices to create a "preview" of a video?

Why I'm asking is because I'm playing around with many encoding settings and options to bring out the best. But the problem is that I can see the final results only after the full conversion. Mostly I'm interested only in the following:
- some kind of general quality (I don't want to browse through the full movie, I usually do only with the first 15 minutes)
- the final filesize of avi

At this moment the problem is that I can see these above only after the x hour conversion.

Do you know how could you get the above two, but without encoding the whole video?

I'm a mplayer/mencoder/*nix user so the ideas for this would be the best - but naturally any theoretical advices are welcomed too.

thanks,
n

[jimmalenko]

Cut your sources to the first 15 minutes, then encode them ?

[Chris K]

I'm not a mencoder user myself but it seems to be possible to encode a arbitrary part of your source.

http://www.misterhowto.com/index.php..._with_mencoder

Hope this helps!