High-quality two-pass MPEG-2 encoder alternative to Mencoder?

[fvisagie]

Hi All,

I am highly impressed by Mencoder's quality, flexibility and degree of user control for DVD-compliant MPEG-2 encodes.

However, as posted elsewhere, I'm experiencing repeated problems with its rate control:

BUFFER UNDEFLOW at stream 0, raising muxrate to 11088 kb/s

Is there an alternative high-quality two-pass freeware MPEG-2 encoder you can recommend?

Many thanks in advance,
Francois

[freebird73717]

HCenc
Use by gui or commandline.

[guns1inger]

Second that - HCEnc is very good.

[lordsmurf]

QuEnc or HCEnc, I forget -- one of them -- try both.
I use MainConcept Reference, personally.

[fritzi93]

To me, QuEnc is only okay, HCEnc is significantly better. I don't use QuEnc any more, but IIRC, usually needed a denoiser/smoother filter to remove grain and noise. HCEnc is reputedly exceptionally good at low bitrates in comparison to almost any other encoder.

[fvisagie]

Thanks for your responses, everyone.

Kind regards,
Francois