VBR in MPEGs?

[RyP]

Hey all, I've been trying out various forms of encoding some VCDs I recently bought...nothing gives me quite enough compression, and since the art of using divx to compress, instead of increase MPEG size, seems to have been lost, I was thinking back and remembered that I once downloaded some MPEGs that were about half the normal 10 MB per minute size...I was told by one friend that this was a result of using variable bit rate...I'd never known MPEGs could do that so...is that possible? If so, how would I go about taking advantage of that, and if not, then what was used to compress them? Thanks in advance.

[Greg12]

VBR can reduce file size, especially in slow moving video.