MEncoder is a media editor, part of MPlayer. It is often used for compressing files and capturing video. This program is part of mplayer a media player. This program has been ported to almost every operating system including Microsoft Windows, Mac OSX, and all forms of Linux, BSD, and UNIX. Using mencoder to rip DVDs allows you to avoid dealing with VOB files, coping large video files, and many other troubles. There are many different video and audio codecs combinations to compress files. Here are some common ones.