Thanks heaps, guys - that's been very helpful.
A 1000 Purrs are working their way towards you!
I got the 1650 from my mencoder config - it's the highest I can go in menc. and still get 115mins onto 1 cdr. I just translated the figures into the tmpg profile. I take it from your posts that tmpg can go higher and still be on one cdr... *when I said 'guideline' I meant a guideline for tmpg - is it "no higher than this, ever!" or "no higher than this, unless you have to"?
I find I'm getting excellent sound results in 128 or 112 Kpbs. My ears can't tell the difference between 128 and 192 (maybe a music dvd needs the higher one?). Sometimes even 96 sounds good.
I try to keep in integer multiples of the original sound rate - 448 I'll do to 112, 384 down to 96. I don't know if it matters, it just seems like it might, going from 448 to 128 is /3.5, the others are all /4.
I've reset the tmpg settings to 2200 max, 120 min, and cq_vbr went up from 21.26 to 21.86 (it's probably just the movie i'm doing..).
At any rate, picture quality is rather amazing - better than mencoder (I hate to say it...
)
(I found that menc. sometimes does a flickery thing on the video - I saved screendumps from MPC, and in one frame the image is perfect, in the next it has macro-macro blocks (BIG squares, sort of 8x8 blocks into one)
Anyway, thanks again, fellow kvcd'ers.