@nomadix:
anyone have any suggestions ?
always do 2 pass encoding
the higher the bitrate, the better the quality
for the best quality at a given bitrate, you cannot beat H264
there is no officially stable version of x264, it is a work-in-progress and new bugs occasionally creep in
while not as up-to-date as x264, mencoder's x264 engine is nice and stable
cheers mate, right back at you