[FFmpeg-user] High Quality Single Pass Encodes

[Bryan Murphy]

Our encodes are targeted for streaming to various devices, so we've
traditionally relied very heavily on fixed bitrates and two pass.  For
one customer, I'm seriously considering switching to one-pass encodes
and using a variable bitrate.

My problem is that when I've tried one-pass encodes in the past, scene
changes in particular come out poorly.

What settings should I be focusing on to smooth out scene changes,
high motion sequences, and make single pass encodes in general look as
good as we can get them?

Our primary target is a 1280x720 1.5mbps h264 baseline encoded video.
Anything we can do to speed up this transcode without significantly
effecting video quality would be very helpful.

Thanks!
Bryan