I'm having problems burning subs into an avi then reencoding in xvid to get an avi that'll play in a divx player - specifically, the result is too lossy. Is there a strategy for reducing losses in video quality for the above? (1st question.)

I've done a 3-pass DivX menccoder process to burn the subs in, selecting the 800MB target, and gone from 700 to only 735MB, then from there to xvid ffmpeg (single pass, no options) selecting the 700MB rate from the bitrate calculator and the result is 505MB! Even if the video quality will be no better at a higher bitrate, shouldn't it respect my request to encode at the rate I select? (2nd question - a philosophical one perhaps.)

0.09w_r5