Improving the results

Getting the best picture quality

Improved results, especially in reducing pixellation on scenes like water and fire, can be achieved by using two-pass encoding. Set this up in the Xvid Configuration dialog.

First choose Encoding type Twopass - 1st pass and encode the clip as usual. The result will be audio only.

Go back and choose Encoding type Twopass - 2nd pass and set the bitrate in the box below. Toggle the button to the left to choose either a target filesize or a desired bitrate. Something like 1000 is good for a full-size clip, 300 for half-size, but experiment and you may get away with much less.

Now encode the clip again for the finished result.

Dealing with interlace

The "combing" artefacts produced by interlaced encoding can be a nuisance. TV shows are usually interlaced, as are NTSC films (using the awful 2:3 pulldown). Interlaced PAL films are indistinguishable from progressive, unless (as too often happens) they've been upscaled from NTSC.

Coding the clip with exactly half (or a quarter) of the original lines deals with the problem, though that's rarely what you want. Using odd fractions of the original can give very weird results.

There's an option to de-interlace by getting rid of half the lines while keeping the horizontal resolution. Use the Settings dialog, select the Advanced Options tab, and check the Remove Interlace from Video box.

Coding for YouTube

YouTube prefers an odd resolution of 640 x 360 (16:9 - 480 x 360 for 4:3) and likes to re-encode the file after uploading. There are two extremes of dealing with this.

Either encode the clip at the ideal resolution and maximum bitrate and let the transcoder do its worst. Or encode at 640 x 360 to start with using a very low bitrate (336Kbs two-pass can be surprisingly acceptable) and hope it doesn't get messed with.

Changing the brightness

Clips often turn out too dark. There's an option to change the brightness in the Xvid Configuration dialog. Press the Other Options button at the bottom and select the Decoder tab. Adjust with the slider - the middle position is default. Don't forget to change this back afterwards.

Removing the black bars

Letterboxing (and pillarboxing) is ugly and unnecessary for a clip played on a PC. I don't know a way to crop them without using a separate program.

Fine tuning the start and end points

These can only be set to the nearest second. Sometimes this isn't good enough and results in clipped audio at the start and finish. All you can do is have the clip start/end five seconds earlier/later and edit it with a separate program.

Using less space for the audio

By default the MP3 encoder uses a bitrate of 192Kbs when for many clips something like 64K is enough. This would save about 1MB of space for every minute of video, a very useful 20% or more on a lo-res clip. But I can't find a way of changing this within AoA.