Hello, when encoding "dark" movies like "Panic Room" or "From Hell", the assumed bitrate to end up in a divx about 1400 MB, i.e. about 1390 for "From Hell", does end in an avi of around only 900 MB (3-pass encoding). Giving the bitrate of about 1200 to mencoder does not make any difference to the file size of the avi; it is also around 900 MB. Are there any special filters or options to libavcodec handling this kind of "dark" movies, so that the "calculated" avi size will be reached after encoding? The command line for mencoder has been: (have encoded the audio first), then --> nice -+19 mencoder -dvd 1 -dvd-device $DVD_DEV -oac copy -o /dev/null -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=1386:vhq:vpass=1:vqmin=2:vqmax=31 -vop scale=640:352,crop=720:434:0:74 wait nice -+19 mencoder -dvd 1 -dvd-device $DVD_DEV -oac copy -o from_hell.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=1386:vhq:vpass=2:vqmin=2:vqmax=31 -vop scale=640:352,crop=720:434:0:74 Thanks for hints, Stephan