Hi there,
Is Tmpeg's built-in predictor reliable (in 2-pass VBR mode) ??

It's reliable (in the sense that it hits the size target pretty accurately) but it's slow. Whether or not it produces higher-quality encodes is something I need to test .

The other problem is that the free version of TMPGEnc only supports the old-style 2-pass VBR, which is crappy. The new implementation in TMPGEnc Plus is much better.