[Libav-user] Setting bit_rate or quality for AVI encoding with mpeg-4 video... audio is fine

[Don Moir]

I looked around quite a lot but found nothing definitive. Everything 
works fine when encoding to the avi container but playing around with 
bit_rate to test file size and quality. The higher the bit_rate the 
bigger file size and better quality which of course is expected. So far 
mostly guess work setting bit_rate for me.

It there a good answer on how the bit_rate should be set? file size is 
not so important and the avi is created on the fly as a recording. All I 
really want to control mostly is the quality level. I played around with 
qscale some but not too much.

One formula I found was bit_rate = (width x height x fps) x (motion 
level) x .07 but that can't be it. motion level is 1,2, or 4