Will changing the "Motion Search precision" from Normal to High or Highest actually increase the quality? Or will it just waste my time?

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PlaiBoi

There's not really that much difference in quality. Very little increase. But encoding time will be like 50% longer.

kwag

Kwag, I always use "high quality" when encoding, I notice a significant difference between it and the "normal" mode. Encoding times aren't increased that much, and anything (simple) that will increase the final picture quality is always worth doing.

the file size also comes down a bit

What time difference are we talking?. On my machine, a source clip of 1:49 minutes takes 2:41 to compress at "Normal". At "Highest Quality", the same clip takes 5:05! That's almost twice. This is in my P4 @1.6Ghz from a clean DVD source. I don't notice that much difference in quality. Not sure on other sources.

Forgot to add. This is with the KVCD 352x240 template.

kwag

Kwag, I'm talking about the "High" setting and not the very high one. There is a noticable difference in picture quality and the time of the encode is only about 25% more.

Ok, I'll give it a try in my next encode!.

kwag