Here's the description I'll add to the mplayer man page:
---
Causes frames with higher quantizers to be more likely to trigger a
scene change detection and make libavcodec use an I-frame (default: 1).
1-16 is a sane range.
Values between 2 and 6 may yield increasing PSNR (up to approximately
0.04 dB) and better placement of I-frames in high-motion scenes.
Higher values than 6 may give very slightly better PSNR (approximately
0.01 dB more than sc_factor=6), but noticably worse visual quality.
---

Original idea from Michael; patch by me.

Originally committed as revision 4883 to svn://svn.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg/trunk