Hi, Thank you all who submitted hints on this. This is what I finally ended up with: - some NTSC dvds wont play/rip on some DVD drives while they will play/rip on others. I tried a few NTSC 29.97 fps movies on a few computers. - those, who rip/play correctly: I specify a (suggested by 1st pass encoding or calculated myelf) bitrate, but it is wrongly passed to encoder. I need to myltiply the desired bitrate by ~1.2 ( I guess that's from 25/29.97, no?) to get proper file length (and bitrate used). So I have to say br=1200 if I want br=1000 and a filesize coresponding to 1000. - all above problems dont apply to PAL dvds (tested some 10 or so) So I am glad, but also very tired. Some resolutions I used, you may find it handy, they are all multiple of 16: 640 x 480 1.33:1 640 x 272 2.35:1 640 x 336 1.90:1 640 x 368 1.74:1 I also developed some simple scripts that facilitate ripping, sound+subtitles and passes for libavc, if you are interested I could publish them. thanks to all who helped DS