Here are a few questions I am hoping you all can help me out with...

In TMPGEnc, is there anything really wrong with setting the lower and upper bounds of VBR to 0 and 9000? I relize the bitrate could spike in those cases, but does it really make that much of an issue?

Does SmartRipper produce video files that are larger then they would be in their natural state? I have run a few tests and am able to cut the size of these files in half by re-encoding them in TMPGEnc, with no noticible artifacting... is there a loss of quality I haven't noticed yet?

If I am ripping a DVD, adding subtitles (through the authoring software) and re-burning it, should I use the files that come out of SmartRipper or should I re-encode to get the filesize back down? With quality being something I want to maintain.

Thanks for any help!

Hoag