I did a bit of testing last night to see what (if any) difference a couple of the TMPGEnc settings make.

I was mainly looking at the CQ setting when using aoutomatic VBR.....as of version 2.5 it looks like this is fixed at 65 (bug?) even when u change it in settings it still uses 65.

So, i used one of the version 12's to test.

I did the same clip (taken from devils advocate) and using automatic VBR with CQ settings of 50, 65, and 80.

i burned them to CD and had a look in my standalone.....the result...NO DIFFERENCE.....i spent a long time watching them and replaying them and i couldnt for the life of me spot any difference.

The filesizes were all the same (expected i suppose as bitrate didnt change) and they all took the same time to encode.

one other thing i tried changing was the motion search....i always use high quality (slow).....i tried highest quality(very slow)...and it was indeed very slow....

I didnt see any noticebale difference in quality when playing back....but the filesize was a little smaller?? i have no idea why.