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[Foolio187]

what is the best bitrate range to encode at for use with XBMC?  I have been encoding movies at about 1500-2000k with mp3 audio at 160.  Is this overkill?  What do you think?  <

[nimbles]

those values seem high to me, for a given resolution e.g. say 640x352 and fixed settings (quantizer, motion search, etc.) there is a theoretical maximum bitrate so just using that high a bitrate may not necessarily mean you actually are achieving it.

also of the avaiable codecs i'd say xvid is the current front runner good comparison over at doom9

best bet for quality at a lower file size is to do 2-pass encodes in xvid or n-pass in divx, single pass assigns constant bitrates and obviously different scenes require different bitrates so doing multipass encodes will allocate bitrate in a more efficient manner.

but if file size isn't an issue, then just crank up the bitrate and do a 1-pass encode.

for audio mp3 has definitely been superceded, with aac and vorbis. for a given bitrate they are better quality so either you have the same size file with mp3 sounding worse, or similar sounding audio with the mp3 taking up more space.

however if you choose to use alternate audio streams you may have to look into using other types of containers- e.g ogg media (.ogm) or matroska (.mkv), both of which are supported by xbmc   <