Hands of in our cases of vqscale! Vqscale means a total linear quantizer!
a) Vqscale isn't that fine adjustable like vqmin and vbitrate etc. Vqscale 2 gives you a "constant" Q flatline at Q value 2 means in high bitrate scenes the Bitrate jumps up to sky and leaves "the orbit" (where 9800 would be still near earth ground
)
b) if you go higher with vqscale, blocks even quicklier come out at dark low bitratescenes like underwater.
So conclusion: a constand Q resulted by Vqscale will give a total inefficient output for our needings. Its like CBR in a Bitrate (not Q) case.
If you look into Packshot commandline you see that there I do also use Vqmin=1 as its the result of many tests which gives the Q factor more room to "breath".
The manual of Mencoder is very informative but I dont trust every theoretic explanation there as "real world tests" and comaprisons do show sometimes different behaviours. Also mencoder is still in developing phase and i.E. there its mentioned how to apply vrc_minrate but as we found out, determining a min bitrate will end up in a bitrate allocation fiasco.