On Mon, 13 Oct 2008, The Wanderer wrote: > Diego Biurrun wrote: >> On Mon, Oct 13, 2008 at 10:28:08PM +0200, Diego Biurrun wrote: >>> On Mon, Oct 13, 2008 at 03:17:26PM +0200, Guillaume POIRIER wrote: >>> >>>> --- DOCS/man/en/mplayer.1 (revision 27751) >>>> +++ DOCS/man/en/mplayer.1 (copie de travail) >>>> .IPs 7 >>>> -Enables rate-distortion optimization of motion vectors and intra modes. >>>> (best) >>>> +Enables rate-distortion optimization of macroblock types in all frames. >>> >>> rate distortion, same below >> >> It seems like rate-distortion is the more common spelling, so scratch >> that... > > There's probably a reason for that. By my understanding of the way > grouping works in English, since you have an adjective+noun pair > modifying a second noun, you need to join the first adjective to its > noun somehow because the two of them effectively constitute a single > unit; the hyphen is the standard way of doing that. > > That's absolutely not a formal rule as far as I'm aware, but it is my > assessment based on an extended informal study of the subject.
I don't think you can parse it as an english phrase, it's math. "Rate" and "distortion" are both acting as variables (and I don't know whether that counts as noun, adjective, or something else, but whatever they are, they're the same type). The hyphen means "vs", though I would never expand it in writing nor speech. And the whole phrase is exactly the same form as "X-Y graph". There are also variants with more terms, such as "rate-distortion-complexity optimization" which trades off between 3 variables. --Loren Merritt _______________________________________________ MPlayer-DOCS mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mplayerhq.hu/mailman/listinfo/mplayer-docs
