Cannot change birate for conversion

I have the latest ffmpeg (0.0.8d). I am trying to convert a VOB file to MPEG4. No matter what bitrate I type in, ffmpeg will always encode the video at the same rate.

I can set the bitrate to 700K/s or 1400K/s, the resulting file will always be much less than expected. I ant to maximize quality, thus I would rather the file to be bigger, btu I cannot find a way to make ffmpeg to encode at higher bitrates.

I tried both mpeg2enc and ffmpeg codecs.

Thanks fo any help!

Ok, I kind of figured something out. The Adaptive Quantizer is still not completely clear to me...but it seems to get higher quality conversion I need to keep these values low. i set the values to Qmin=2, and Qmax=8, and it seems my output file sizes will finally be closer to my target values. Before I had Qmin=10 and Qmax=25.

Am I thinking correct here?