[MPlayer-users] 2 pass with lavc, 2nd pass looks a little worse (only a little)

[upgrdman at mindspring.com]

in the docs, it says that the second pass should look considerably better than the first pass, but for me it doesnt. it look the same it some parts, and WORSE in others. i dont think this happened before, but i cant remember the version of mplayer/mencoder that i used to use that worked great. it was an old old version, like 0.60, or somewhere close.

now my second pass looks, like i said, the same, with some parts looking worse. i looked closely... even on scenes where it looked bad on the first pass, looked jsut as bad on the second pass...

im compressing a dvd-rip, ntsc, and according to mencoder, its telecined, so i set the ofps to 24 :) and it duplicatres LOT less frames than it used to :) (but this is not what appears to cause my problem with mediocre 2nd pass outout fules.) and yes i know technically it should be 23.973 or something like that, but 24 is good enough for me :)

i dont get any errorrs, and im compressing with lavc/mpeg4.

heres my command:

mencoder NationalSecurity.vob -aid 128 -oac mp3lame -lameopts abr:br=96 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=1000:v4mv:qpel:vlelim=-4:vcelim=9:lumi_mask=0.05:dark_mask=0.01:vhq:vpass=1 -sws 2 -vop scale=608:336,crop=720:466:0:4 -ofps 24 -o NS-compressed-1.avi && mencoder NationalSecurity.vob -aid 128 -oac mp3lame -lameopts abr:br=96 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=1000:v4mv:qpel:vlelim=-4:vcelim=9:lumi_mask=0.05:dark_mask=0.01:vhq:vpass=2 -sws 2 -vop scale=608:336,crop=720:466:0:4 -ofps 24 -o NS-compressed-2.avi

(it should be all one line, but i think my email client messed it up...)

so any ideas? if necessary i could upload the first and second pass output files, but they each ~700MB... which kinda surprises me actually... theyre so close in size to each other...i think less than 1MB difference. shouldnt the second pass have a bigger or smaller gap in size?

any ideas?

thanks,

farrell farahbod