I'm just reencoding the first episode of Ghost In The Shell: Stand-Alone Complex for the n-th time (while zeroing in on an AVISynth filter combination that helps clean up the edge-enhancing mess that it is) and I got a garbled image sequence at about 2:10 into the file. At first I thought it was caused by the custom MPEG matrix I was using, so I encoded the 20 seconds surrounding that part again using H.263, but the artifacts stayed: Next I tried disabling cartoon mode, and that fixed the problem for good: I'm using Celtic Druid's current CVS head build from the 10th of January. I was doing a full quality first pass, i.e. a quant 2 encode, and the following options: Unrestricted profile, H.263, adaptive quant, quarter pel (I think), default BVOPS, no packed bitstream, default PAR, chroma optimizer, MSP 6, VHQ 4, VHQ for B-frames, chroma motion, no turbo, max I-frame interval of 250, quants 2-31 each, trellis. The two resulting 20 seconds of video can be found here: Here's the installer for Celtic Druid's build in case you need it - he's overwriting it with each compile: If you need any other info, just ask. In the meantime, I guess I'll just go back to Koepi's older CVS head compile for the moment and don't use cartoon mode... :) np: Zorn - Rock The Boat (The City's Collapsing (But Not Tonight))

I think it comes from the combination VHQ with B-frames plus cartoon mode. IIRC i stopped using cartoon mode for this very problem when VHQ for b-rames became available. I use some koepi's bild, but the symptom is the same.

A known threshold problem i reported that a while back but looks like no solution was found yet, besides not everyone uses Cartoon Mode thats also the reason i deactivated it in my EDP Build. You have only 2 choices @ this time to workaround it you can leave b-frame off cartoon on or the other way b-frame on cartoon off both on will couse this problem. In Real footage it's much more visible and more anoying then in this sample here also look on frame 340 on her leg not really visible for non trained eyes :P