ok, I'll play around with it. How fast should I expect a XviD encoding to go? Do the results that I am getting sound right? 2.5 hours to do a two pass of 15min of video? (source: 640x480 divx5 15000bitrate) Quant:mpeg VHQ:1 Bframe:2 (I also used the Smart De-Interlace filter from Graft). This goes at about the same speed as if I checked "Enable Interlacing" I have a Athlon (Tbird) 1.4Ghz 256 ddr ram running xp

Yes that sounds about right. VHQ, B-frames and deinterlacing can really cut into your speed. Even turning off VHQ could increase it quite a bit.

I'm quite sure encoding from a HuffYUV source goes faster than encoding from a DivX 5 or XviD source. But you won't know how much until you try it out. Which go for a lot of other things as well btw...

I tried to capture a short clip with huffyuv then recompress to XviD and it took the same amount of time. My deinterlacing filter seems to cut the speed in half. VHQ seems to add on 5fps to the speed. I ran a test last night with a bunch of different settings, I still have to look at the results. I know with nothing at all, I can get near 30fps. It drops down to like 18 with the deinterlacing filter Then like 12 with VHQ 1 if I addon B-frames and chroma, it goes down to 7 or 8