[MPlayer-users] After updating - Faster encode, lower quality

[andrew at WARnux.com]

I've been using x264 to encode videos now for months.  Encoding a full
length movie used to take about 11 hrs and the quality was splendid.  I
built the latest mplayer/mencoder and x264 a few days ago and now my 
encodes only take about 4 hours but the quality is degraded.  What 
really confuses me is that I didn't change my command line parameters at 
all.

How is this possible?