So I finally have the hard drive space to start ripping my DVDs to my PC 
(in a few months, I'll buy 3 1TB disks for a raid 5 array, to store all 
my media on - but for now, I'll just rip part of my collection).  I'm 
using TMPGEnc to encode them as .mp4 files for iTunes, and I'm trying to 
figure out good settings for them.

Unfortunately, creating various setups, testing them, and comparing them 
is rather time consuming.

Does anyone have some suggestions for what I should use?

I tried 800kb average, 1500 max for full resolution rips, but on scenes 
with a lot of movement this ends up with quite blocky results.  I'm 
thinking of upping this to 1500 average, 2500max.

Also, some of my stuff doesn't need full resolution, so I drop the frame 
size down to 480x320 (from 720x480).  For this, so far it seems that 350 
average is good enough, but again I'd like to hear from others who have 
been through this.

Any advice?

And does it really help that much using 2 pass VBR, instead of 1 pass? 
(I'm willing to live with the additional encoding time if it makes a 
difference, but I haven't tried two side by side encodes to see the 
quality difference).

-- 
...Ben Chambers
ben at pacific web guy dot com (no spaces)
www.pacificwebguy.com

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