yeah, I like to waste peoples' time. @ChannelK, if you want an easy and fast way to get good settings, try doing this: Use gordianknot as a bitrate calculator, and to determine the compressibility of your movie (so you can get an optimal resolution choice). then almost always use neutral bicubic resizing (soft bicubic on animation or on very long 1 CD materials, even bilinear for noisy animation but not for live movies). DivX 5 settings: disable q pel and GMC (there are some bugs with GMC with the current DivX 5 decoder, should be fixed next version though). and enable b-frames. now the advanced parameters: max quant: varies (make it from 8-12, do some test clips that have both high mo and low mo in them... for 2 CD rips you can probably safely go 8-10, it really depends on the material) RC averaging: half of the total frames of your movie (so if your movie is 500 frames, it should be set at 250) you can make everything else the defaults.. and no psycho stuff! also, force film when possible and if not possible IVTC with decomb! also make sure not to resize with the codec's built-in resize filter. it is shitty. that should give you near-optimal if not optimal settings.. can't get much closer though.. so be happy :D and sorry if I went into too much detail here..